I picked up a dish.

I said, “Anybody want more of these?”

I have been asked what I was thinking.

I was thinking: don’t make it a thing. I was thinking that if I said something there would be a scene, and my aunt would cry, and my mother would be wounded for a month, and I would spend four weeks managing it.

I was doing arithmetic about the cost of a bad evening.

And the reason I could do that arithmetic so quickly is that the cost was not going to be mine.

The cost of saying nothing was going to be paid entirely by the woman on the other side of the table, and I had been putting it on her account for eighteen months and the account was open and the transaction took me no time at all.

In the car she did not speak for about six miles.

Then she said: “Do you know what she said?”

And I said: “Carmen, you know how she is.”