The first of those dinners, in the renovated house, was painfully awkward.
There was an empty chair at the table that no one mentioned and everyone felt.
Micah brought fresh vegetables from the market.
Ezra brought flowers.
Deborah insisted on the good plates, the ones saved for occasions.
For a while they talked carefully about nothing — the weather, a neighbor’s new fence — until Wendell set down his fork and said, plainly, that he had spent enough of his life in a family that kept the peace by keeping secrets, and he didn’t want a quiet family that was only quiet because it was afraid.