Chapter 1 - The Napkin at Table Nine
I want to tell you about the worst night of my life, and I want to tell it straight, because I have spent forty-five years being polite about things that did not deserve my politeness.
My name is Margaret Ellsworth.
I am seventy-four years old, and on the night this happened I was sitting at table nine in the Hawthorne Room, the private banquet hall at the back of a restaurant my husband Walter and I have used for every important dinner since 1979.
The room has dark wood panels and gold sconces on the walls, and the chandeliers throw little points of light onto the white tablecloths.
It was our forty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Two hundred guests had come.
Walter was not there.
He was three miles away at St. Anne's, in a hospital bed, with a heart that had decided in October that it was finished being reliable.
I had almost canceled the dinner twice that week.
Walter told me not to.
He said, "Margaret, you go.
You sit at that table.
I will be home before you know it."
So I went.
I wore the dark navy dress I had bought in the spring, the one with the long sleeves, because I have never liked my arms and I have never pretended otherwise.
I sat at the head of table nine with an empty chair beside me, and I put my white cloth napkin in my lap, and I smiled at people for two hours.
Then my daughter-in-law Brooke came and stood over me.
Brooke is thirty-one years old.
She has chestnut-brown hair that she wears swept up for occasions, and that night she was in a deep burgundy off-the-shoulder gown that cost more than my first car.
She married my son Craig six years ago.
She has never liked me, and I have never been able to figure out exactly why, though I have my suspicions now.
She stood beside my chair and looked down at me the way you look at a stain on a carpet.
I had been crying.
I will not pretend I had not.
I had been thinking about Walter in that hospital bed, and about the empty chair, and about how a woman can be surrounded by two hundred people and still feel like the last person left in the room.
I raised my napkin to my right cheek and wiped it, slowly, because my hands were not entirely steady.
Brooke watched me do it.
Then she said, loud enough for the next table to hear, "Oh, come on!
You're seriously gonna sit there crying like some innocent victim?
Cut the damn act!"
I lifted my eyes to her.
I want you to understand that I was not surprised.
I was tired.
I lowered the napkin and I said, "I've put up with enough of your disrespect.
You don't get to humiliate me like this."
Her eyes went wide.
Her eyebrows shot up, and her mouth opened like I had slapped her, and she said, "What the hell did you just say to me?!
You've got some nerve!"
The man in the charcoal-gray suit at the next seat, our friend and attorney David Rourke, leaned toward the table like he was trying to decide whether to step in.
Brooke leaned closer to me.
Her shoulders were tight and her neck was stretched forward, and she said, "Don't you dare run your mouth at me!
You're embarrassing yourself in front of everybody!"
I did not look away from her.
I said, "You think your fancy dress and nasty attitude make you better than me?
You're dead wrong."
That was when I noticed the man in the doorway.
He was standing in the dark opening at the back of the room, behind Brooke, where the hallway goes toward the kitchen.
He was tall, with a broad build and short dark hair, and he was wearing a formal black suit with his hands folded in front of him.
He was not a waiter.
He was not a guest.
I had never seen him in my life, and yet he was watching me with the calm, patient expression of a man who had been told to wait for exactly the right moment.
Brooke did not see him.
She was still talking.
She said, "Everybody's sick of your bullshit!
Stop pretending this whole damn family revolves around you!"
I pushed myself up out of my chair.
I said, "You can call me whatever the hell you want, but I won't let you treat me like garbage!"
Brooke's face twisted.
Her lips were trembling, and she said, "You've been lying through your teeth this whole damn time, and you think nobody's gonna call you out?!"
And that was the moment I understood.
She was not talking about the napkin.
She was not talking about the tears.
She was talking about the letter.
I sat back down slowly, and I pressed the napkin against my cheek one more time, and I looked past her at the man in the doorway, and I thought, Walter, what did you do?
