It arrives whole, in an instant, the way a light comes on, and everything that had been shapeless in the dark is suddenly just furniture you can walk around, and you wonder how you ever managed to keep tripping over it.

Chapter 6 — Order Whatever You Want

The server had barely finished handing out the menus before the ordering began, and it began, as it always did, from the top of the price column downward.

My sister-in-law went first, because she always went first.

Three of the grand seafood towers to start, she told him, with a little flick of the hand that dismissed the very idea of a price, and two bottles of the reserve Cabernet to open with.

My father-in-law, leaning back in his chair with the contentment of a man who has never once been handed the consequences of his own appetite, ordered the dry-aged bone-in ribeye, rare, with a lobster tail set on top of it, because it was his birthday and a man should have surf and turf on his birthday.