Chapter 9: Just for Show

Sunday had been this way his whole life: the long table, the good linen, the staff moving around the outside of the room, his grandfather at one end of it and his mother and father partway down, and the machinery of a family that had been eating this meal since long before he arrived. He knew every plate in the room by the chip on its rim.

His mother had the floor. She was talking about a wedding whose details he had missed at the start, and about the flowers, which had been wrong, and the far end of the table had taken it up and was keeping it going. Nobody at this end had looked at Milo since.

Adrian looked at the tablecloth.

A fold ran beside his plate, one of the hard pressed folds that comes out of the linen closet and does not move for the whole meal. The light from the tall windows lay along it, and along the silver, and along the gravy going stiff at the rim of the platter, and none of it was interesting, which was the point of looking at it.

He looked at his grandfather’s plate. Half eaten. The rim wiped clean with bread. One green bean pushed off to the side and left there, like something being saved.

Then he looked at Milo’s plate.

The piece he had put there was gone — crust, fat, all of it, down to a smear of gravy on the white china. Milo’s own fork lay on the cloth at his right, square with the edge of the plate, where he had set it down when he was finished. He had not helped himself to anything in an hour and a half: not the potatoes, not the bread sitting two inches from his elbow. When he was done eating, his hands had gone back down to the cloth on either side of his plate.

Adrian’s own fork was still lying on the rim of Milo’s plate, halfway onto the tablecloth, where a fork does not go.

He put his hand on the platter.

There was no decision in it. There was a hand on the silver, and then the whole heavy dish was moving down the table — past the bread basket, past the salt — and stopping in front of Milo’s plate, where it sat and steamed.

Then he took the serving fork out of the roast and put a second piece on the plate.

He did not say anything, and he did not look up. He laid the serving fork down across the platter and put his hand flat on the table and left it there.

Three people looked up at once.

His father stopped chewing. Douglas looked at the dish sitting in front of Milo, and then at his wife, and Vivian looked back — a flat, quick look across the tablecloth, the kind married people pass over other people’s heads — and then she turned and looked at her son.

Adrian looked back at her.

He had nothing for her. His face had been arranged the same way since they sat down, and it stayed arranged. She held on a second longer. Then her napkin moved in her lap, and she looked down the table, and said nothing at all.

His grandfather’s fork came down.

Arthur laid it on his plate without eating anything off it. He stared at the two of them for one long second, and then he laughed — one hard crack of it, out loud, in a room where the only sounds so far had been cutlery — and once he had started he kept going, head back, until he had to put a hand on the table.

Somebody down the middle of the table said, “Well.” Somebody else laughed at that. Then two of the women were laughing with him, and one of them said something Adrian did not catch, and Walter stood at the end of the room with the water pitcher in his hand and did not move.

“Eat up,” Arthur said, still laughing. The words came out around it. “You need your strength.”

Milo did not answer him.

He smiled — small, quick, closed, about halfway and stopped — and looked down at his plate, and his ears went red. Both of them, up out of the collar and into the tips in about a second and a half, while he sat perfectly still and let it happen.

Adrian looked at the ear.

He wanted to bite it.

He heard it — his own head, his own voice, saying that, at his grandfather’s table, with the room still laughing around him — and something behind his ribs went sideways.

His face did almost nothing. It frowned.

Milo looked up.

Head down, eyes up, nothing above the collar moving. There was a way to look at the person beside you at this table without anybody seeing you do it, and he had learned it in this house.

He caught it. The line between Adrian’s brows. The small crease that turned up when the coffee was cold, or the numbers were wrong, or somebody across the table had done a thing that Adrian Hale was going to have to think about.

Everything he had been holding went out.

Something cold went through him, as if a door had been left open somewhere else in the house, and he put his hand on the edge of the table and held on to it. Under his ribs something had started up — one long pull, then a pause, then another pull — and there was nothing he could do about it, so he sat still and let it finish.

Just for show.

He had known that at the first piece. He had known it the whole time he was eating, and he had eaten every scrap of it anyway, and now there was a second piece on his plate and Arthur Hale was laughing at the head of the table with one hand flat on the cloth.

Of course it was for Arthur. Arthur had wanted this wedding and had gotten it. Adrian Hale did not make scenes and did not explain himself, and a plate of meat cost him nothing, and the room would be talking about it in the car for a week.

And Milo had let it mean something. In front of all of them. In this chair.

That was the part he could not get past. Not the meat. The minute in the middle of it when he had been happy anyway, with every one of them watching.

He cut the second piece into small squares and ate it.

It did not taste like anything. He kept his eyes on his plate the whole way down, and chewed, and swallowed, and did not say one word, and when he was finished the china came up white again.

Beside him, Adrian turned his head.

It was not much. Half a second, maybe a little more, resting on the side of Milo’s face, and then it was gone. Long enough to notice something. Not long enough to ask about it.

He noticed.

Whatever it was, he had looked at it for the length of one bite and decided against it and gone back to the middle of the table. Which was fine. Milo was not going to hand him anything to ask about.

Neither of them said anything about it. The lunch went on.

The rest of the lunch ran out.

Walter came around the long way and took the plates, from the right, one at a time, and said nothing. Coffee came out and mostly stayed in the pot. Arthur told a story about a roast and a cook and a fire, and laughed at the end of it himself, and the far end of the table laughed with him. Vivian made sure everybody had something in front of them. Douglas checked his watch twice. The light came off the tablecloth by degrees and nobody moved to get up.

“Thank you for lunch, sir,” Milo said quietly, to the table, when the plates were gone.

Arthur lifted two fingers off the cloth at him — a wave, the whole of an answer — and went back to his coffee.

Then Adrian got up.

He did not make anything of it. Napkin down, chair back, and the table went quiet. Half of them were still waiting for the explanation they had been owed since the first piece of meat. He said nothing on the way out. Arthur lifted the same two fingers at him as he went past, and got a look for it, and that was the goodbye, and the dining room let him go.

Milo looked up once — at the back of the jacket going out through the doorway, past the front of the hall where Walter was already standing with the coat over his arm — and then down again, before anybody in this room could see him do it.

In the hall, Walter said, “Mr. Adrian.”

Then the front door, and then the gravel.

Milo sat where he was.

His plate was empty. Adrian’s fork was still lying across the rim of it, halfway onto the cloth, in the wrong place, exactly where it had been left. Walter would come back around with the stack and take it in with everything else, and there would be nothing left of it in this room.

His ear was still hot. He could feel it. He put his hands flat on the cloth, on either side of his plate, and left them there.