These were people who had driven an hour through a wrecked highway to celebrate thirty-five years together, arrived to an empty table and a cruel joke about a cucumber, and absorbed it the way gentle people absorb such things — by smiling, by trying to make everyone else comfortable, by shrinking themselves so as not to make a scene.

I had learned that instinct from them.

It is a decent instinct, in a decent world.

But it had made all three of us easy to step on.

And now I watched my mother and father eat a meal that had been ordered specifically, defiantly, for them — watched them slowly understand that this time their daughter was not going to smile and absorb it, that this time someone was drawing the line they had spent their whole lives too gracious to draw — and I saw my father’s shoulders come down from around his ears, and I saw my mother’s eyes go bright, and I understood that I was not only defending them from Wilhelmina.

I was showing them something.