The Ferreras had been arguing about the tablecloth since four o'clock.

"The blue one has that stain," Nadia said, holding it up to the kitchen window like an X-ray. "Right there. From the Christmas thing."

"Nobody looks at tablecloths." Rafael was on his knees in front of the oven, poking a fork into a chicken thigh. Juices ran clear and he made a small satisfied noise. "They look at the food. They look at whether there's enough wine."

"There's enough wine. You bought four bottles for six people."

"Five people. The Okonkwos are bringing their nephew."

Nadia stopped. "Since when?"

"Since this morning. Adaeze texted." He straightened up, knees popping, and pulled the roasting pan out with two dish towels because he could never find the mitts. "He's twenty-three. He'll eat like a horse. I made extra potatoes."

She found the white tablecloth instead, the one from her mother, and shook it out over the table in a snap of linen. It settled crooked. She adjusted it, adjusted it again, and then let it stay slightly wrong because Rafael was right — nobody looked at tablecloths.

"Candles or no candles?" she called.

"Candles. But the short ones. Last time Bill couldn't see over the tall ones and he kept leaning around like a periscope."

She laughed, and he heard it, and he grinned at the chicken.

By six-fifteen the kitchen smelled like garlic and rosemary and the sharp green bite of the salad she was tossing with her hands because tongs bruised the leaves. Rafael came behind her, reached past her shoulder for the pepper mill, and paused there a second longer than he needed to.

"It's good," he said. "The whole thing. It's good."

Nadia wiped her hands on the towel tucked into his waistband, which she had been doing for nineteen years.

The doorbell rang.


The invitation had said seven, so at half past six Marisol was still barefoot in the kitchen, arguing with a lemon.

"It's not going to zest itself," Theo said, passing behind her with a stack of plates. He set them down and immediately began rearranging them into a fan shape that served no purpose.

"Stop styling the table. Nobody looks at the plates."

"Junie looks at the plates." He straightened one anyway. "She said last time our forks were 'aggressive.'"

"They're forks."

"They're heavy. She has small hands." He went to the sideboard for napkins, found none folded, and started folding them badly.

Marisol got the zest off the lemon and dumped it into the chicken marinade, then wiped her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle — the one Theo had asked her three times not to use as a hand towel. He saw. He said nothing. She noticed him not saying anything, which was somehow worse.

"The wine," she said.

"Chilling. Two whites, one red breathing on the counter. I got the one Danny likes."

"He likes everything."

"He likes that one more."

By ten to seven the chicken was in, the potatoes were crisping, and the kitchen had reached the specific chaos that always preceded competence. Theo lit the candles. Marisol went to change and came back in a green sweater, still barefoot.

"Shoes?" he said.

"It's our house."

He considered this, then bent and took his own shoes off, lining them up by the door.

The doorbell rang at four minutes past. Marisol looked at the counter — the cutting board, the lemon husk, the towel in the wrong place — and Theo swept all of it into the sink in one motion.

"Ready?"

"No," she said, and opened the door laughing.


The Reyes-Whitfield Cookout

Diane found the good tablecloth at the bottom of the linen closet, folded into a shape that suggested it had been shoved there in a hurry sometime around the holidays. She shook it out over the patio table and frowned at the crease running diagonally across the middle.

"Nobody's going to look at the tablecloth," Marcus said. He was crouched by the grill with a wire brush, scrubbing at grates that had gone gray and crusted since August.

"I'm going to look at it."

"Then iron it."

"Then bring me the iron."

He set down the brush and went inside, and she heard him rummaging in the hall closet, then the laundry room, then the hall closet again. He came back with the iron and an extension cord and set both on the picnic bench without comment, which she recognized as an apology for the tone he'd used.

By six the potatoes were roasting and Marcus had the chicken thighs laid out in neat rows, brushing them with a marinade he refused to explain to anyone, including her, after eleven years. Diane cut the stems off the flowers she'd bought at the grocery store and arranged them in a mason jar because the vase had broken in the spring and neither of them had replaced it.

"Did you tell them seven or seven-thirty?" she asked.

"Seven."

"You said seven-thirty."

Marcus paused with the basting brush in the air. "I might have said seven-thirty."

They looked at each other. Diane laughed first, and then he did, and she went inside to put the good glasses on a tray while he lowered the grill lid and checked his watch and decided that whichever it was, they'd manage.

At 6:52 the first car pulled into the driveway. Diane called through the screen door that they were early, and Marcus called back that they were right on time.


The Vasquez-Lindstrom kitchen had two cooks in it, which was either a blessing or a hazard depending on the hour.

"You're crowding the pan," Miriam said, not looking up from the cutting board. "The mushrooms need room or they steam."

Daniel shifted the skillet off the burner and spread the mushrooms into a single layer with the back of a wooden spoon. "There. Room. They're practically in separate apartments." He wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder and reached past her for the wine.

She caught his wrist. "That's for the sauce."

"There's a second bottle."

"The second bottle is for the guests."

"Then I'll open a third." He kissed the top of her head and went to the pantry anyway.

Miriam finished the shallots and swept them into a bowl. Through the window over the sink she could see the backyard going gold, the folding table they'd carried out that morning because six people wouldn't fit in the dining room, not comfortably, not with the leaf that had gone missing sometime during the last move. Daniel had promised to look for it. That was four years ago.

He came back with a third bottle and set it on the counter with a small triumphant thunk. "Napkins," he said. "Cloth or paper."

"Cloth. They're in the hall closet, second shelf, behind the—"

"Behind the thing. I know." He was already going.

She heard him rummaging, heard something fall, heard him say it was fine. The mushrooms had started to brown properly now, releasing that deep smell that made the whole house feel occupied.

He returned with the napkins, six of them, mismatched. He fanned them out on the counter like a card trick.

"Those don't match."

"Nobody's ever noticed."

"I notice."

"You're not a guest." He grinned. "Set the table with me?"

She turned off the burner and followed him out.


The Vasquez-Lindqvist kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt sugar, which Dara insisted was intentional.

"It's a caramelization," she said, scraping the pan. "There's a difference."

Tomás didn't argue. He was folding napkins into shapes he'd found online that afternoon, and three of the five looked like wilted birds. He set those at the places where the light was dimmest.

They'd invited four people: Priya and her husband Gene, who always came early, and the Okonkwos, who always came late and brought better wine than anyone deserved. Six chairs around a table meant for four, which meant borrowing two from the bedroom and pretending the mismatch was deliberate.

"Did you get the good olives?" Dara asked.

"I got olives."

"That's not the same answer."

He held up the jar. She squinted, made a face that might have been approval, and went back to the sauce. Twenty-two years of this—the squint, the sauce, the small negotiations of a Saturday.

Tomás put on music, then changed it, then changed it back. He lit the candles too early and had to blow them out so they wouldn't be stubs by dessert. Dara caught him doing it and laughed, a short bark of a laugh, and he felt the particular satisfaction of having amused someone who had heard all his material.

At six-forty she disappeared to change. She came back in the green shirt, the one he liked, and he told her so, and she said, "I know," and straightened his collar.

"The bird napkins are a disaster," he admitted.

"They're fine. Nobody looks at napkins."

The doorbell rang at six-fifty-eight. Priya and Gene, early as promised, holding a bakery box.

Dara wiped her hands on a towel. Tomás reached for the door. They glanced at each other first—a quick, unremarkable look—and then the evening began.


The Hollisters had argued about the tablecloth for eleven minutes, which Dana considered a personal record.

"It's linen," Marcus said, holding it up to the kitchen light. "Linen wrinkles. That's what linen does. It's practically its whole personality."

"Then iron it."

"I *did* iron it. This is post-ironing." He draped it over the dining table anyway, smoothing the creases with the flat of his hand until they were more suggestion than fact. "Nobody's coming here to inspect our textiles."

Dana was at the stove, prodding a pan of shallots that had gone slightly further than golden. She turned the heat down and added a splash of wine, and the kitchen filled with a sharp, good smell. "The Ferrises inspect everything."

"The Ferrises love us."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

He laughed and went to the cabinet for wineglasses, holding each one up to check for water spots, breathing on the cloudy ones and buffing them with a dish towel. There were six, which had seemed like plenty when they bought them and now seemed like exactly enough, no margin for error. He set them out anyway.

"Did you get bread?" Dana asked.

Marcus paused. He had gotten many things. He had gotten olives and a wedge of cheese he couldn't pronounce and a second bottle of the red they liked, and he had stood in the bakery aisle for a full thirty seconds thinking about something else entirely.

"I'll go," he said.

"You have twenty minutes."

"I have twenty *glorious* minutes." He grabbed his keys off the hook, then stopped and came back and kissed the side of her head, which she allowed without turning from the pan.

"Sourdough," she said. "Not the seeded one."

"Not the seeded one."

The door closed. Dana stirred, tasted, added salt, and stood for a moment in the quiet, listening to the car back down the driveway, already rehearsing the story of the bread for when their friends arrived.


Marisol found the good tablecloth in the wrong drawer, folded wrong, which meant Dev had put it away last time. She shook it out over the table and let it settle.

"They're bringing wine," Dev called from the kitchen. "Petra texted. She asked if we still like reds."

"Do we?"

"I said yes. It felt easier than a conversation about it."

Marisol smoothed a crease with her palm. The table sat six, though they only needed four, and she left the extra chairs against the wall so the room wouldn't look expectant. Outside, the light was going amber over the neighbor's fence, and somebody two houses down was running a leaf blower with real commitment.

In the kitchen, Dev had the chicken out and was staring at it the way he stared at anything that required a decision. "Forty minutes or fifty?"

"Forty, then check."

"That's not a real answer."

"It's the only honest one." She came in and took the pan from him, sliding it onto the rack herself. "Did you buy lemons?"

He held one up without turning around, a small triumph.

They worked in the narrow space between counter and stove, trading places with the automatic courtesy of people who had been doing it for years. Dev chopped parsley too coarsely. Marisol didn't say anything, then said something, then apologized, then he laughed and said she was right, the parsley was practically firewood.

At six-fifteen she changed her shirt. At six-twenty he changed his, having seen hers.

"They'll be late," Dev said, sitting down on the arm of the couch. "They're always late."

"I know."

"I like that about them, actually."

Marisol lit the candle in the center of the table, blew out the match, and sat down across from him to wait. The chicken made its small sounds in the oven. Neither of them turned on the television.


The invitation had gone out on a Tuesday, casual, three couples, nothing fancy. By Saturday afternoon it had become, as these things do, slightly more than nothing fancy.

Dale stood at the counter with a paring knife, working through a bag of small potatoes, halving them and dropping them into a bowl of cold water. He had a system. He always had a system, and it was always slower than it needed to be, and Ruth had learned twenty-some years ago not to comment on it.

She was working around him, wiping down the table, pulling out the leaf and fitting it into the gap. The extra leaf lived in the hall closet behind the coats and always came out smelling faintly of cedar and mothballs.

"Did you get the good napkins?" she asked.

"They're in the drawer."

"They're not in the drawer. I looked."

Dale set down the knife and went to look, and found them in the drawer, in the back, folded under a stack of place mats. He held them up without saying anything. Ruth took them from him and said, "Well, they weren't there before."

The chicken had been marinating since noon. Dale had wanted to grill it, but the sky had gone the color of dishwater around two and neither of them trusted it. So the oven, then. Ruth turned it on to preheat and immediately the kitchen felt ten degrees warmer.

At five-fifteen she went to change her shirt. Dale swept the front step, which nobody would notice, and moved a pair of work boots off the porch into the garage, which somebody might.

When she came back down he had opened the wine to let it breathe, and had put on the shirt she liked, the blue one, without being asked.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she said.

"We have exactly enough chairs."

Headlights swung into the driveway.


The rain had stopped by four, which Nadia took as a sign the evening would go well.

"The good glasses or the everyday ones?" Tomás called from the dining room, where he was wrestling the leaf into the table. It always stuck on one side.

"Good ones. It's Priya's birthday."

He grunted, gave the table a final shove, and the leaf dropped into place. Six chairs. They'd only ever needed four before the neighbors moved in across the street, and now Saturdays had a rhythm again.

In the kitchen, Nadia was browning short ribs in the heavy pot her mother had left her, the one with the scorch mark shaped vaguely like Florida. She'd started the braise at two so it would fall apart by seven. Tomás came in behind her, kissed the back of her neck, and reached past her for the wine.

"That's for the sauce."

"There's two bottles."

"That's for the sauce and the guests."

He opened the cabinet instead and found a third, dusty, from a trip they'd taken years ago and kept meaning to drink. "This one, then."

They worked around each other the way people do after enough years — she at the stove, he at the sink washing salad greens twice because she'd once made a comment about grit that he had never entirely lived down. He set the table wrong, forks on the right, and she fixed it without saying anything, and he noticed and said nothing either.

At six-thirty he changed his shirt. She put on earrings and looked at the table, the mismatched candles, the folded napkins, the flowers he'd bought at the grocery store and trimmed badly.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks fine."

"It looks nice," he insisted, and the doorbell rang, and she was already smiling when she went to answer it.


The Nakamuras had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"The linen one has a stain," Priya said, holding it up to the kitchen light. A faint ring of red wine near one corner, ghostly after three washes.

"Then we use the blue," Dev said from the stove, where he was reducing a sauce he refused to let anyone else touch. "Nobody looks at the tablecloth."

"Marguerite looks at the tablecloth."

He conceded the point with a grunt and turned the burner down. Outside, the November dark had arrived at four thirty, the way it did now, and the kitchen windows had gone black and reflective, doubling everything.

Priya laid the blue cloth and smoothed it with her palms, corner to corner, then set out the good glasses, counting to six twice because she'd lost track. Dev came behind her with a stack of small plates and she moved without looking, a half step left, the choreography of nineteen years.

"Did you get bread?"

"I got two loaves. One of them is probably stale."

"Which one?"

"That's the mystery," he said.

She laughed despite herself. He'd been funnier lately, or she'd been listening more; she wasn't sure which. She lit the candles, then blew them out again — too early, they'd burn down to nubs before anyone arrived — and stood a moment in the smell of the extinguished wick.

Dev tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted again, and held the spoon out to her without a word. She came over and tried it.

"More lemon."

"You always say more lemon."

"Because it's always true."

He squeezed in half a lemon. In the hallway, the doorbell rang twenty minutes early, and they looked at each other with the particular alarm of people who are almost, but not entirely, ready.

"Coats," Priya said.

"Sauce," Dev said, and neither of them moved for one more second.


The Ferrises had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes, which Dana considered a personal record.

"The blue one has a wine stain," Marcus said, holding it up to the kitchen light like evidence in a trial.

"It has *character*. Nobody's going to be inspecting the linens."

"Sofia inspects everything."

Dana conceded the point and pulled the cream tablecloth from the hall closet, where it had been folded since Thanksgiving. She shook it out over the dining table while Marcus went back to the stove, where a pot of something dark and fragrant had been reducing since two o'clock. He'd been mysterious about it all week. She'd caught him watching videos on his phone at midnight, the volume off, subtitles glowing.

"Six-thirty or seven?" she called.

"I told them six-thirty. Sofia will come at seven."

"So we have time."

"We have time for you to fix the thing with the chairs."

The thing with the chairs was that one of them had a wobble, and had for two years, and Dana had promised in some previous administration to shim it. She got a folded index card from the junk drawer, knelt on the floor, and worked it under the short leg while Marcus stepped over her to reach the pepper mill.

"You're going to want to taste this," he said.

She stood and took the spoon he offered, blew on it, tasted. Something happened in her face that she didn't bother to hide.

"Right?" he said.

"What is it?"

"I'm not telling you until they ask."

She wiped her hands on a dish towel and looked at the table—the cream cloth, the mismatched water glasses, the candles they'd bought for a different occasion and never lit. It looked, she thought, like a place where people would want to sit for a long time.

"Put on music," Marcus said. "Something before eight o'clock."


The Vasquez-Lindquist household smelled like burnt garlic by four-thirty, which Renata considered a bad omen and Peter considered a solvable problem.

"It's fine," he said, scraping the pan into the trash. "We start over. We have time."

"We have ninety minutes and no garlic."

He held up a jar of the pre-minced kind, the one she'd banned from the house two years ago and which he had evidently smuggled back in. She decided not to comment. Instead she went to deal with the dining room, where their daughter's homework had colonized the table—loose worksheets, a protractor, a half-eaten granola bar fused to a page of long division.

Peter had opinions about the seating. He always did. He came in drying his hands on the dish towel he wasn't supposed to use for that and moved the candles two inches left.

"Sarah's going to sit here," he said, "because if she sits across from Marcus they'll talk about the school board the entire time and I will lose my mind."

"You brought up the school board last time."

"That was different. I was provoked."

Renata found the good napkins, which were not actually good, just less stained. She ironed four of them badly while Peter got the chicken into the oven and put on the record he always put on, the one that made him move his shoulders a little when he thought no one was watching. She watched.

At six-fifteen he came up behind her at the sink and rested his chin on her head, which he could do and enjoyed doing.

"It smells like actual food now," she said.

"I told you. Solvable."

The doorbell rang eight minutes early. Renata swore quietly. Peter kissed the top of her head, tossed the dish towel over the back of a chair, and went to let them in.


The Ferreras had agreed on the menu Tuesday and revised it twice since.

"You said no soup," Danny called from the kitchen, holding the pot lid like evidence.

"I said no *cold* soup," Rosa answered. She was in the dining room, moving the good glasses from the hutch to the table, two at a time, because she didn't trust herself with four. "Cold soup is a statement. Hot soup is hospitality."

He conceded the distinction and turned the heat down. The kitchen smelled like garlic and the lemon he'd zested badly, taking too much white with it. Outside, the light was going orange over the neighbor's fence, and the dog next door had started its evening complaints.

Rosa came in and stood behind him, looking over his shoulder at the pot. "That's more than six servings."

"It's exactly six servings if nobody's polite."

"They're always polite. Marta takes half a ladle and then eats three pieces of bread."

"Then Marta gets bread." He wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder and turned around. "The Halloran chair is still wobbling."

"I know."

"I can fix it in four minutes."

"You can *start* fixing it in four minutes." But she was already going to the closet for the toolbox, and he was already pulling the chair away from the table, tipping it to find the loose joint, muttering about wood glue and how nobody builds anything to last.

They worked in the shorthand of long practice: she held, he tightened, neither narrating. When it was steady, Rosa sat in it hard, twice, to test.

"Fine," she said.

"Fine," he agreed.

Then the doorbell, twenty minutes early, and Danny looked at the pot, and Rosa looked at the six glasses, and they both laughed before either of them moved.


By four o'clock the kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter, and Dana had already ruined one batch of rolls.

"They're not ruined," Marcus said, prying a blackened disc off the baking sheet with a spatula. "They're rustic."

"They're charcoal." She dumped the tray in the sink and it hissed. "We have forty minutes."

He handed her a glass of wine without being asked, then went back to the dining room to deal with the table. The leaf hadn't been put in since Christmas, and it stuck halfway, so he braced a knee against the table's edge and pulled until it gave with a wooden groan. Two of the chairs didn't match. He decided that was fine.

In the kitchen, Dana had moved on to the second batch, setting the timer this time and standing over the oven like a hawk. She'd made the chicken thing that Ellen always asked about, the one with the lemon and the olives, and the recipe card was soft and stained from a decade of use.

"Do we have candles?" Marcus called.

"Junk drawer. Behind the batteries."

He found two, mismatched, and stood them in jelly jars because he couldn't locate the holders. Then he swept the front hall, wiped the bathroom mirror, and shoved a laundry basket into the bedroom closet.

Dana came out with a bowl of olives and surveyed his work. "Jelly jars."

"Rustic," he said.

She laughed, and it broke something loose in her shoulders. He took the bowl from her hands, set it down, and put his palms on her arms for a second, which was all it took.

The rolls came out golden. She lined them in a basket with a dish towel while he changed his shirt, and when the doorbell rang at five-thirty, they were both, more or less, ready.


The invitation had gone out three weeks ago, and now the evening had arrived faster than either of them expected.

Deborah stood at the counter, sleeves pushed to her elbows, working a paring knife around the pit of an avocado. Behind her, Ray was on his knees in front of the sideboard, pulling out the good plates—the ones with the thin gold rim that had been his mother's, used maybe four times a year.

"Six or eight?" he called.

"Six. Marta's bringing her sister, but the Colemans backed out."

"Then why am I finding eight?"

"Because you're counting wrong."

He held two up to the light, checking for the chip he remembered on one of them, then carried the stack to the table and began setting places. He'd never gotten the hang of which side the fork went on, so he arranged them the way Deborah always did, from memory, adjusting each one until the handles lined up.

The kitchen smelled like garlic and something browning. Deborah slid a pan into the oven and set a timer she immediately distrusted, then began wiping down the counter with the focused violence she reserved for the twenty minutes before company.

"Wine's in the garage," she said. "The red should come in and breathe."

"How long does it need?"

"Longer than we have."

Ray went out through the mudroom and came back with two bottles under one arm, pausing to straighten a picture frame in the hallway that had been crooked, she suspected, since spring.

At six-forty, he changed his shirt. At six-fifty, she lit two candles and stepped back to look at the table, and he came and stood beside her, and neither of them said anything for a moment.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It does."

Then the doorbell rang, and they both moved at once.


Marisol found the good tablecloth at the back of the linen closet, folded around a sachet of lavender that had long since given up its scent. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev counted chairs in the next room, discovered they were one short, and went to the garage for the folding one with the wobbly leg.

"We can put a coaster under it," he said, carrying it in sideways through the doorway.

"We can put Tom under it. He never notices anything."

Dev set the chair at the corner and tested it with his palm. It rocked. He went back out for a shim.

The chicken had been in the oven forty minutes and smelled like rosemary and burnt garlic in equal measure, which Marisol decided was fine. She pulled the pan out, spooned juices over the skin, and slid it back. Then she started on the salad, tearing lettuce with more force than the lettuce required.

"You're mad about something," Dev said from the floor, where he was wedging a folded matchbook under the chair leg.

"I'm not mad. I'm behind."

"Those look the same on you."

She threw a radish at him. He caught it, mostly, and ate it.

By six-fifteen the table was set with the mismatched water glasses they'd stopped apologizing for years ago. Dev opened the wine to let it breathe, then poured two small glasses because breathing was a theory and they were thirsty. Marisol lit the candles, looked at them, blew one out because two seemed like too much.

"It's four people," she said. "Why am I nervous?"

"Because you like them." He handed her the glass. "Sit for five minutes. The chicken doesn't need you."

She sat. Outside, a car door shut, then another. They looked at each other, and Dev went to answer the bell.


The Delgados had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"It has a stain," Marisol said, holding it up to the kitchen window. "Right there. See?"

Tomás squinted. "That's the pattern."

"It's olive oil from Rosa's birthday."

"Then we'll put the bread basket over it."

She gave him a look that had been refined over nineteen years of marriage, and he surrendered, retrieving the good linen from the hall closet while she returned to the stove. The kitchen smelled of garlic and browning onions, and something underneath that—rosemary, maybe, from the pot she kept on the sill and refused to let die.

The Hendersons were coming at seven, along with Dev from Tomás's old job. Six people total. Marisol had planned for twelve, because she always did.

"You're making too much," Tomás said, counting the chicken thighs in the roasting pan.

"They'll take leftovers."

"They never take leftovers."

"They'll take them this time. I bought containers."

He laughed and reached past her for the corkscrew, and she leaned back slightly against him without either of them acknowledging it. Then she was moving again, checking the oven, wiping a counter that was already clean.

Tomás set the table. He put the forks on the wrong side and she fixed them without comment, which he noticed and decided to let go. He lit two candles, then blew one out because she said it looked like a séance.

At 6:40 they stood together in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, surveying it: the mismatched chairs, the water glasses that didn't match either, the pot of something bubbling behind them.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks fine."

"It looks nice, Mari."

She adjusted a napkin. "Go change your shirt," she said. "That one has olive oil on it."


The invitation had gone out on a Tuesday, casual, three friends and a promise of nothing fancy. By Saturday afternoon, Dolores had changed her mind about nothing fancy twice.

"The good plates or the everyday?" she called from the dining room.

Roy was at the sink with his sleeves pushed up, scrubbing a roasting pan that had been soaking since noon. "Whichever ones don't have the chip."

"They all have the chip."

"Then whichever chip you like best."

She laughed and set out the blue ones, the ones her mother had given them when they moved into the house, the ones that had survived four moves and one dropped box. Four settings, though there would be five people. She went back to the cabinet and found the odd plate, white with a gold rim, and put it at the head of the table where Roy would sit. He wouldn't notice.

He came in drying his hands and noticed immediately.

"I get the fancy one?"

"You get the lonely one."

He kissed the top of her head on his way to the thermostat, which he nudged down two degrees because five people in a small house generate their own weather. Then he went out to the garage for the folding chair, the one with the wobbly leg, and jammed a shim of cardboard under it the way he did every time and always meant to fix properly.

Dolores put the chicken in at four thirty. She had made too much rice again and knew it and didn't care. Roy opened the wine to let it breathe, then wiped a ring off the counter, then straightened the pictures in the hallway, which were not crooked.

At five forty the porch light went on. At five fifty they stood together in the kitchen, not talking, listening for tires in the driveway.


The doorbell wouldn't ring for another hour, but Marisol had already changed her shirt twice.

"The blue one," Daniel said from the kitchen, not looking up from the cutting board. "You wore the striped one when the Ferrises came."

"You remember that?"

"I remember you spilled wine on it."

She let that pass and went to check the table. Four places, because they'd invited Theo and Anne-Marie and no one else, having learned the hard way that six people meant two separate conversations and someone left stranded at the corner. The napkins were the good ones, the linen ones her mother had pressed into her hands years ago with an expression that suggested they were both an inheritance and a test.

Daniel was doing something aggressive to a bulb of garlic with the flat of a knife.

"You're supposed to smash it, not assault it."

"This is smashing."

"That's assaulting."

He handed her a spoon with sauce on it instead of arguing. She tasted it, considered, and reached past him for the salt.

"I already salted it."

"I know. I could tell."

The oven timer went off and they moved around each other without collision, a choreography built out of a decade of small kitchens. He pulled the bread; she found the board. He asked if they had candles and she said the drawer, and he said which drawer, and she said the drawer, and he found them.

At ten minutes to seven they stood in the doorway looking at the room together, the way people do before guests arrive—seeing it suddenly as strangers might, the crooked picture, the stack of mail shoved behind the plant.

"It looks nice," Daniel said.

Marisol straightened the picture. "It looks like us."

Headlights swung across the front window. She checked her shirt one last time, and he went to open the door.


At six o'clock, Nadia found her husband standing motionless in front of the open refrigerator, one hand on the door, the other holding a lemon.

"You've been there four minutes," she said.

"I'm thinking," Tomas said. "There's a difference between standing and thinking."

"Is the difference visible?"

He shut the door with his hip and set the lemon on the counter, where it rolled a slow half-circle and stopped against the cutting board. "The chicken needs another twenty. That gives us time to hide the mail."

The mail was a growing civilization on the dining table—catalogs, a jury summons, three separate envelopes from the same dentist. Nadia scooped the whole mass into a paper bag and carried it to the bedroom, where she set it on the dresser with a certain ceremony, as if the bag might be offended by rough handling.

When she came back, Tomas had put on music, something with a piano in it, and was arranging four mismatched chairs around a table meant for six. He'd found the good napkins. He was folding them badly.

"Like this," Nadia said, taking one. She made a rectangle, then a triangle, then something that looked like a rectangle again.

"That's what I did."

"It is not what you did."

Outside, a car door shut. They both looked up, then at the kitchen, then at each other, running the same quick inventory: chicken in, salad undressed, wine open, one lemon still unused on the counter.

"Bread," Tomas said.

"Warming."

"Since when?"

"Since I put it in while you were thinking."

He laughed, wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder, and went to the door. Nadia lit the two candles, blew out the match, and stood a moment in the small changed light before following him.


Naomi found the good tablecloth in the linen closet, folded beneath a stack of towels she'd been meaning to donate. It smelled faintly of cedar. She shook it out over the dining table while Desmond argued with the oven, which had decided that 375 degrees was a suggestion rather than a commitment.

"It's running cold," he said. "I can tell."

"You always say that."

"And I'm always right." He slid the chicken in anyway and set a timer on his phone, then another on the microwave, because he didn't trust the phone.

They had forty minutes. Naomi counted out six plates, remembered that Elena was bringing her sister, and counted out seven. Desmond swept the crumbs from the counter into his palm and dumped them in the sink, which she noticed and decided not to mention.

"Did you get wine?" she asked.

"Two reds. And that sparkling thing Priya likes."

"She stopped drinking."

Desmond paused, dish towel over his shoulder. "Since when?"

"Since March. I told you."

"You told me something in March. It may not have been that."

Naomi laughed and went to find candles. There were three in the junk drawer, all different heights, and she set them out anyway in a row, unmatched, which looked deliberate if you didn't think about it too hard. Desmond came behind her with the salad bowl and moved one candle six inches to the left.

"Better," he said.

"It was fine."

"It's better now."

The doorbell rang eleven minutes early. Naomi looked down at her socks, then at Desmond, who was still holding the salad.

"You get it," he said. "I'm indisposed."

She pointed at him — a promise of later retribution — and went to the door, smoothing her shirt, already smiling before she turned the handle.


Marguerite discovered the crack in the serving platter at four in the afternoon, which she considered a personal betrayal by an object she had owned for nineteen years.

"We have other plates," Desmond said from the kitchen doorway. He was holding a paring knife and a shallot, and he had that expression he wore when he thought a problem was smaller than she did.

"Not ones that fit the roast."

"Then we'll carve it in here and bring it out on the white ones."

She considered this. It was, annoyingly, a reasonable solution. She set the cracked platter on the counter and went to find the white plates, which lived on the high shelf and required the step stool, which Desmond had left in the garage after cleaning the gutters in September.

He retrieved it without being asked. This was how they had managed for a long time — she named the obstacle, he removed it, and neither of them said thank you because saying thank you would have implied the arrangement was unusual.

By five-thirty the house smelled like garlic and rosemary. Desmond had opened the wine to breathe and had drunk a small amount of it, which Marguerite noticed and let pass. She was arranging chairs, counting them twice, moving the reading lamp so no one would have to sit in shadow.

"Ellis is bringing that woman," she said.

"Priya."

"I know her name. I'm saying he's bringing her, which means he's serious, which means we should not tell the story about the boat."

Desmond laughed. "That's the best story we have."

"We'll get another one."

He came around the counter and straightened the collar of her blouse, a small maintenance gesture, and she stood still for it. Outside, a car door closed. They looked at each other, briefly, the way people do before the front of the evening begins.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the back of the linen closet, still smelling faintly of the cedar block she'd tucked in there last winter. She shook it out over the dining table, and Dev caught the far corner before it could drift onto the floor.

"Crooked," he said.

"It's not crooked, you're standing crooked."

He walked around to her side, squinted, and admitted she was probably right. Then he went back to the kitchen, where a pot of something orange and fragrant was threatening to boil over. He turned the burner down and stirred, tasting from the wooden spoon, adding salt, tasting again.

"How many chairs?" Marisol called.

"Six. Unless Priya brings her sister."

"Then seven."

"Then we're using the one from the office."

She went to get it, and it screeched across the hardwood until Dev came out and lifted the other end, and together they carried it in silence, the way people do after enough years of moving furniture together.

The doorbell would ring at seven. It was ten past six. Marisol lit the candles too early and then blew them out, embarrassed, and Dev pretended not to see. He was arranging olives in a small dish, moving them around with more attention than olives require.

"You changed your shirt," she said.

"The other one had turmeric on it."

"This one has turmeric on it."

He looked down. It did. He swore quietly and went upstairs, and she heard him rummaging in the closet, drawers opening and closing. She took the opportunity to eat one of the olives.

When he came back down in a gray shirt, she was standing at the window with her arms crossed, watching the street.

"It looks nice," he said, meaning the table, the room, all of it.

"It does," she agreed, and reached back for his hand without turning around.


The invitation had gone out three weeks earlier, and now Priya stood in the kitchen doorway assessing the damage.

"You said you'd take the recycling out Tuesday," she said.

Daniel looked up from the cutting board, where he was mangling an onion. "I took *some* of it out."

"You took the cardboard. Which was the easy part."

He set down the knife and wiped his hands. "Fine. Trade me. You do the onions, I'll do the bins."

They swapped without further negotiation, a maneuver refined over eleven years. Priya scraped his uneven pieces into a bowl and started over on a fresh onion, dicing it small the way the recipe actually called for. Through the window she watched him drag the bins down the driveway, pausing to wave at a neighbor.

By six-fifteen the lamb was in the oven and the house smelled like garlic and rosemary. Daniel came back in and started on the table—cloth napkins, because Priya had asked, though he'd argued for paper on the grounds that Marcus once used a napkin to clean his glasses.

"Wine glasses or the regular ones?"

"Wine glasses. And use the good ones, not the ones from the grocery store."

"There's a difference?"

"There's a difference."

He found four matching stems in the back of the cabinet and held one up to the light, discovering a water spot. He polished it with a dish towel while Priya put on music, something instrumental and unobtrusive, and turned it down twice until it sat under conversation rather than over it.

At six-fifty she changed her shirt. At six-fifty-five Daniel realized he'd forgotten to buy bread and made a decision to say nothing about it.

The doorbell rang at 7:04. They looked at each other across the living room.

"Bread," he admitted.

"I know," she said. "I bought some yesterday." She went to answer the door.


The evening had a schedule, and Priya had written it on the back of an envelope: 5:15, start the rice. 5:40, Daniel takes the trash out before anyone arrives. 6:00, guests.

At 5:20 the rice was not started, because Daniel had discovered that the good serving bowl — the wide ceramic one with the blue rim — had a hairline crack running from lip to base.

"It's fine," he said, holding it up to the kitchen light like a doctor reading an X-ray.

"It leaks."

"It weeps," he said. "Slightly. We'll line it with foil."

Priya took the bowl from him, set it in the sink, and handed him an onion. He accepted his demotion without complaint and began chopping badly, in uneven chunks, the way he had for eleven years and would, she assumed, forever.

She started the rice. She wiped the counter twice. She turned on music and then turned it down because the neighbors' baby had been up all week, and Daniel said, "They're going to hear us anyway, we laugh like hyenas," and she said, "You laugh like a hyena," and he agreed that this was true.

At 5:45 he found the tablecloth still in the dryer, wrinkled into a topographical map. He shook it out over the table anyway and set the candles strategically over the worst of it.

At 5:52 the doorbell rang — early, of course, because Marcus was always early and always apologetic about it.

Priya looked at Daniel. There was onion on his shirt and a dish towel over his shoulder and the rice was five minutes from done.

"Stall him," she said.

"With what?"

"The bowl," she said. "Tell him it's an heirloom."

Daniel grinned, hung the towel on the oven handle, and went to open the door.


The Vasquez-Lindqvists had been arguing about the tablecloth since four o'clock.

"It has a stain," Rosa said, holding it up to the kitchen window. "Right there. From the Petersons' anniversary."

"Nobody will see it under the serving dish." Peter was hunting for the good corkscrew, the one with the wooden handle, which had migrated somewhere during a previous dinner and never returned. He opened a drawer full of takeout menus and rubber bands.

"I'll see it."

"Then we'll put the bread basket over it."

She laid the cloth down anyway, smoothing it with both palms, deciding. In the oven, a chicken was doing what chickens do, filling the house with a smell that made the whole enterprise feel worth it. Rosa had brined it overnight in a bucket that took up half the refrigerator, which Peter had complained about twice and then stopped complaining about.

He found the corkscrew behind the coffee maker. "Victory."

"Open the red now. It needs to breathe."

"Does it, though? Or is that something people say?"

"It's something people say that's also true."

Peter opened the bottle. He poured two inches into a juice glass and drank it standing up, which she pretended not to notice, and then he went to set the table because that was his job, always had been, since the first apartment with the folding chairs. Four places. He put the forks on the wrong side and she moved them without a word as she passed with the butter dish.

At six-forty he changed his shirt. At six-fifty she lit the candles and turned off the overhead light, and the kitchen went soft and amber and forgiving, the stain invisible, the counters a friendly clutter.

"It looks good," Peter said.

"It does." Rosa untied her apron. "Don't tell them about the bucket."

The doorbell rang. They looked at each other, and he went to answer it.


The apartment smelled like garlic before four o'clock, which Dana considered a good sign. She stood at the counter, sleeves shoved past her elbows, pressing the heels of her hands into a mound of dough that refused to behave.

"It's too sticky," she called.

Marcus came in from the balcony carrying the folding chairs, one under each arm. "Add flour."

"I've added flour. It's had more flour than a bakery."

He set the chairs down and wiped his palms on his jeans before touching the dough, which she found endearing—he always washed up before handling anything she was cooking, as though her kitchen were an operating theater. He pinched off a piece, rolled it between his fingers, and nodded like a man confirming a diagnosis.

"It's the humidity. Give it ten more minutes and stop fighting it."

"You're very calm for someone who hasn't started the salad."

"I'm calm because I haven't started the salad."

He started the salad. While he tore lettuce into a wooden bowl, Dana went to deal with the table, which was really a desk they'd dragged in from the second bedroom and covered with the good cloth, the one from his mother. Four places. Two chairs from the kitchen, two folding. She lined up the forks and then moved them a quarter inch, twice.

"They're going to sit down and eat," Marcus said, not looking up. "Not measure."

"Rachel measures."

"Rachel has never measured anything in her life."

At six-fifteen the bread came out lopsided but golden, and Dana held it up like evidence. Marcus took the photo she demanded, then reached past her for the wine opener and knocked over the pepper grinder, and they both stood there a second, laughing at the small disaster, before the buzzer rang and they went to answer it together.


By six o'clock the kitchen smelled like garlic and browning butter, and Nadia had flour on her wrist where she'd pushed her hair back.

"They said seven, right?" she asked.

Tomas was crouched in front of the liquor cabinet, moving bottles aside. "Seven, but Marcus is always fifteen minutes early and pretends he isn't."

"Then we have thirty-five minutes."

"We have plenty." He stood with a bottle of vermouth, squinted at the label, and set it on the counter. "This expired in a year I don't want to say out loud."

"Throw it out."

"I'm going to throw it out." He didn't throw it out. He carried it to the sink, poured half of it down the drain, then stopped and smelled the glass. "Actually, that's fine."

Nadia laughed without turning around. She was pressing dough into a tart pan with her knuckles, working from the center outward the way her mother had shown her, and she was aware, in the low background way of long marriage, of Tomas moving behind her — the clink of glasses coming down, the drawer with the good napkins sticking and then giving.

"Do we own four matching forks?" he called from the dining room.

"We own eight."

"We own six and two impostors."

"Then use the impostors and put them at our places."

He came back in and stood beside her, examining the tart pan. "That looks better than last time."

"Last time was fine."

"Last time was a crime scene."

She elbowed him, and he caught her wrist, kissed the flour off it, and went to answer the phone that had started buzzing on the counter — Marcus, calling to say he was running early, and did they need him to bring anything.

"Ice," Tomas said, watching Nadia slide the tart into the oven. "Bring ice."


The rain had stopped by four, which Nadia took as a good sign. She stood at the kitchen window scraping carrots into the sink while Theo hauled the folding chairs up from the basement, one under each arm, banging them against the doorframe on the way through.

"You're going to take the paint off," she said, not turning around.

"The paint's already off. I'm just finding it."

He set the chairs by the table and stood back to consider the arrangement. Six people in a room built for four. He'd suggested they eat in shifts, as a joke, and Nadia had not laughed, so he'd let it go and started rearranging instead — the armchair pushed toward the bookshelf, the side table exiled to the bedroom.

She had the chicken out, patting it dry with paper towels, a bowl of lemon halves and rosemary beside her. Theo came up behind her and looked over her shoulder.

"Do we have enough of that?"

"Enough of what?"

"Chicken. There's Marcus."

"Marcus is one man."

"Marcus is a phenomenon."

She handed him the garlic and a knife. He crushed the cloves with the flat of the blade the way she'd shown him years ago, and she watched for a second to make sure he did it right, then went back to the bird.

At six they were still not ready. The bread was in the oven, the salad undressed, and Theo was on his knees in the living room trying to get a wobbling chair leg to behave with a folded matchbook. Nadia came in with two glasses of wine and set one on the floor beside him.

"Leave it," she said. "Whoever sits there can rock a little."

He looked up at her, considered, and stood.

The doorbell rang eleven minutes early.


The doorbell was still an hour away, and Dana had already changed the tablecloth twice.

"The blue one looked fine," Marcus said from the kitchen, where he was pressing garlic with the flat of a knife because they'd never owned a press.

"The blue one has that stain from Thanksgiving."

"Nobody's going to be examining the tablecloth."

"Rosa examines everything." Dana smoothed the cream linen and stepped back, tilting her head. It would do. She went to the cabinet for the good glasses, the ones that only came down four or five times a year, and held each one up to the light before setting it on the counter for Marcus to rinse.

He rinsed them. He'd learned years ago that this was faster than arguing about whether they needed rinsing.

The chicken had been in since four, and the whole house smelled like lemon and thyme. Marcus lifted the lid, spooned juices over the top, and put it back. Dana came up behind him and looked over his shoulder.

"It needs another twenty minutes."

"I know. I set a timer."

"Did you actually set it, or did you say you'd set it?"

He showed her his phone. She kissed his shoulder and went to deal with the bathroom, which meant putting out the folded hand towels nobody would use and hiding the laundry basket in the closet.

By six-forty they were both sitting at the kitchen table with the lights low and the candles not yet lit, sharing the heel of the bread and a glass of wine between them, the way they always ended up doing—too keyed up to sit properly, too tired to keep circling the house.

"We forgot to make a playlist," she said.

"I'll put on the radio."

"That's not the same."

"They're our friends," Marcus said. "They come for us."

Dana laughed and reached for the matches.


The rain had let up by four, which Nadia took as a sign the evening would go well.

"The good glasses are on the top shelf," she called from the kitchen, where she was coaxing a stubborn head of garlic apart with her thumbnail. "Behind the platter we never use."

Devon appeared in the doorway holding two of them, already fogged from his breath. "These have dust in them."

"Then wash them."

"I'm washing them." He ran the tap and squinted at the glass in the light above the sink. "You know Priya is going to bring a bottle we can't pronounce and then explain it to us."

"I like when she does that."

"I like it too. I'm just saying we should be prepared to have opinions."

Nadia laughed and slid the garlic into the pan, where it hissed and immediately filled the room with a smell that made both of them stop for a second. She turned the heat down. Devon dried the glasses one at a time and set them at the four places he'd already laid, then adjusted the forks so they lined up, then unadjusted them because he decided it looked fussy.

"Did you get bread?" she asked.

"Two loaves. One's for us later."

"You're a genius."

"I know."

He put on music, something low with a lot of piano, and she asked him to skip the fourth song because it always made her sad. He skipped it. Then he came and stood behind her at the stove and tasted the sauce off the spoon she offered without being asked.

"More salt," he said.

"I know. I was waiting for you to say it."

By six-thirty the table was set, the windows were open to the wet street smell, and they stood together in the kitchen, briefly with nothing to do, listening for the buzzer.


The Ferrantes had been arguing about the chairs since noon.

"We have six," Dara said, counting again with her finger in the air. "Six chairs, eight people."

"The piano bench," Marcus said from inside the refrigerator. "It seats two if nobody's shy."

"Nobody's shy after the second bottle." She wiped the table down for the third time, catching a ring of something amber near the corner that had survived breakfast. "Did you get the good salt?"

"I got salt."

"That's not the same answer."

He emerged holding a bundle of parsley like a bouquet, offering it to her with a small bow. She took it, unimpressed, and started picking the leaves off while he pulled the chicken from its brine. He'd started the brine the night before, which was the kind of planning he only managed for other people.

By five the kitchen had gone warm and loud. Marcus had the radio on a station that played too many commercials, and Dara turned it down twice without saying anything, and he turned it up once and then let it go. She made the dressing in a jar and shook it hard enough that her bracelet clacked. He tasted it off the back of a spoon, added mustard, and she let him.

"The Pruitts are always late," he said.

"Kaye's always late. Bill sits in the car."

At six-fifteen she went upstairs and came down in a green sweater she'd owned for eleven years, and he told her she looked good in it, and meant it, and she said the oven light was out and he should have fixed it in April.

They set the piano bench at the head of the table. Marcus lit two candles; Dara blew one out, said it was too much, then relit it when he wasn't looking.

The doorbell rang at six-forty. Neither of them moved for a second, listening.


The Fitzgeralds had argued about the tablecloth for eleven minutes, which Dolores considered a personal record.

"The blue one shows crumbs," Ray said, holding it up like evidence at a trial.

"The white one shows everything. At least blue has the decency to lie." She took it from him and shook it out over the dining table, and he caught the far corners without being asked, the way he had for thirty-one years. They squared it together. Neither of them said anything about the small burn mark near the center, which they covered with a trivet and a bowl of pears.

He went back to the kitchen and started on the onions. Dolores had learned not to hover; he had a system involving a very sharp knife and a great deal of muttering, and the results were always better than hers. She counted out silverware instead. Six of everything, though only four people were coming, because Ray insisted that a table should look generous.

"Did you tell Marguerite about the dog?" he called.

"I told her the dog would be in the bedroom."

"The dog will not stay in the bedroom."

"Then I've lied to Marguerite," Dolores said, "and I'll live with that."

He laughed at that, once, sharply, and she heard the knife resume.

By six-fifteen the chicken was in and the windows had steamed at the corners and the house smelled like garlic and butter and the lemon polish she'd used on the sideboard that afternoon. Ray came out drying his hands on a dish towel and looked at the table, then at her.

"You changed your earrings."

"I did."

"They're good." He tucked the towel over his shoulder. "You want a drink before they get here?"

"Half a glass."

He poured two full ones and handed her the fuller. Outside, a car door shut.


The invitation had gone out three weeks earlier, which meant Nadia had spent three weeks revising the menu in her head and two days actually cooking.

"You're doing the thing again," Tomás said, coming in from the garage with two folding chairs under one arm.

"What thing."

"The thing where you make four appetizers and then apologize for not making five."

She scraped chopped parsley off the cutting board with the flat of her knife. "They're small appetizers."

He set the chairs by the table and started wiping them down, though they'd been clean when he stored them. That was his version of her four appetizers, and they both knew it. The dining room had needed the leaf added, which took twelve minutes and a certain amount of swearing, because the table had been his grandmother's and the mechanism had opinions.

"Napkins," he said. "The cloth ones or the ones from the drawer?"

"Cloth."

"They're wrinkled."

"Then iron them."

He looked at her. She looked back, not unkindly, and he went to find the iron.

By six-fifteen the lamb was resting under foil and the kitchen smelled like garlic and rosemary and the burnt edge of something she'd caught in time. Tomás lit two candles, decided it looked like they were trying too hard, blew one out, then relit it because the table looked lopsided.

"Wine," Nadia said. "You never opened the wine."

"I was ironing."

"You were ironing for forty minutes."

"There were six napkins."

She handed him the corkscrew and touched his back as she passed, brief, the way you touch a doorframe you've walked through ten thousand times.

Headlights swept across the front window. He straightened the candle. She untied her apron, hung it on the hook, and pushed her hair back with both hands.

"Ready?"

"No," he said, and went to open the door.


The invitation had said seven, which meant Ravi started cooking at four and Dana started worrying at four-fifteen.

"You bought the wrong rice," she said, holding up the bag like evidence.

"That's the rice we always buy."

"We always buy the one in the green bag."

Ravi looked at the bag, then at her. "This is the green bag."

"It's teal." But she was already laughing, and she set it on the counter and began pulling plates from the cabinet, counting them twice because she could never trust the first count. Six. Four guests, two of them. She stacked them on the table and went hunting for the good napkins, the ones her mother had given them years ago and which they used perhaps twice a year, always with a faint sense of ceremony.

In the kitchen Ravi worked the way he always did, with too many pans going and a towel over his shoulder like a man in a film about cooking. He tasted the sauce, added something, tasted again, made a face.

"Come here," he said. "Is this too much lemon?"

Dana tasted it from the wooden spoon. "It's exactly enough lemon."

"You always say that."

"Because you always ask when it's exactly enough."

She wiped down the table, which did not need wiping, and moved the vase of grocery-store flowers an inch to the left, then an inch back. Ravi turned on music, something instrumental, and the apartment began to smell the way it smelled when things were going right.

At six-fifty she changed her shirt. At six-fifty-five he changed his. They stood together in the small hallway, surveying the living room, the lit candles, the bowl of olives.

"It looks good," he said.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

The buzzer rang. Both of them jumped, then went to answer it.


The Fitzgerald-Okonkwos had been arguing about the tablecloth for twenty minutes.

"The linen one has a wine stain," Diane said, holding it up to the kitchen window. Late afternoon light came through the fabric, and there it was, a pale amoeba near one corner.

"Put a candle on it," Emeka said. He was slicing cucumbers with more force than the task required. "Nobody inspects tablecloths."

"Marguerite inspects tablecloths."

He conceded the point by saying nothing and reaching for the second cucumber.

She found the blue cotton one instead, shook it out over the table, and smoothed it with her palms while he ran water over the vegetables. The house smelled like the chicken that had been in the oven since four, and underneath that, faintly, like the lemon cleaner she'd used on the bathroom counters at noon.

"Did you get bread?"

"Two loaves. They're in the car."

"They're in the *car*?"

"I'll get them," he said, and did, coming back in with the paper bag tucked under his arm and cold October air clinging to his sweater. He set the loaves on the counter and stood behind her for a moment, one hand on her shoulder, surveying the table.

"Six chairs," he said. "We have five."

"The desk chair from upstairs."

"It rolls."

"Then Tom can be the one who rolls."

Emeka laughed, which was what she'd wanted. He went to find the desk chair. Diane counted out forks, then went back and counted them again because she'd lost the number thinking about whether they had enough ice.

By six-fifteen the chicken was resting, the salad was tossed, and the wine was open. Emeka lit the candle and set it, without comment, roughly where the stain would have been. They stood in the doorway looking at the room.

"It's fine," she said.

"It's good," he said, and the doorbell rang.


The Weeknight Dinner

Marcus was pulling the roasting pan out of the oven when Diane came in with an armful of folded napkins and the news that Rosa and Ted were bringing their neighbor.

"That's five," she said. "Do we have five of anything matching?"

"We have five forks." He set the pan on the stove and prodded the chicken skin with a finger. "Beyond that, I make no promises."

She went to the cabinet and started counting plates, holding each one up to the light out of habit, checking for the chip that had been on one of them since before they moved. "Four good ones and the blue one with the crack."

"I'll take the blue one."

"You always take the blue one."

"Because I'm the host and hosting means eating off the broken plate. It's in the manual."

Diane laughed and set the stack down, then reached past him to steal a piece of skin off the chicken. He swatted at her hand and missed. She backed away chewing, entirely unrepentant.

While he made the sauce, she moved the table—the awkward part, the part they'd done a hundred times, where they each took an end and shuffled it three feet left so the fifth chair could squeeze in. She wedged an old paperback under the short leg. He came out with the salad and put it down and the table didn't wobble, and he nodded once, approving.

At six-forty she went to change her shirt. At six-fifty he lit the candle in the middle of the table, then blew it out, deciding it was too much, then lit it again when she came back and said it looked nice.

The doorbell rang. They looked at each other across the small, crowded, perfectly adequate room.

"Ready?" she said.

"Get the door," he said. "I'll get the wine."


The doorbell wasn't due to ring for another hour, but Nadia had already changed her shirt twice.

"The blue one was fine," Owen said from the kitchen, where he was pressing garlic with the flat of a knife because he'd never found the garlic press after the move.

"The blue one had a stain from Tuesday."

"Nobody would have seen it."

"I would have seen it." She came in and surveyed the counter, which held three cutting boards in various stages of usefulness, a bowl of shallots, and a glass of wine he'd poured for himself twenty minutes ago and hadn't touched. She took a sip of it and handed it back.

"Do we have enough bread?"

"We have a loaf and a half."

"For six people?"

Owen looked at the bread, then at her. "I'll slice it thin."

She started on the salad, tearing lettuce because he'd told her once that cutting it bruised the leaves, and she'd never verified this but had adopted it anyway, the way you adopt a lot of things. Behind her, he was arguing with the oven, which ran hot and always had.

"Did you tell Marcus about the parking?"

"I told him the street's fine after six."

"It isn't, though. There's the permit thing."

"Then he'll walk two blocks," Owen said. "He's a grown man."

Nadia laughed and set the bowl down. She found the good napkins in the drawer under the placemats, counted six, found a seventh in case. Owen came around the island with the chicken in a roasting pan and slid it in, and for a moment they stood together looking at the closed oven door as if something might be visible through it.

"We should light the candles," she said.

"Not yet. They'll burn down."

"Fine. In twenty minutes."

"In twenty minutes," he agreed, and went to find the corkscrew.


The invitation had gone out on a Tuesday, and by Saturday afternoon Rosa had reorganized the refrigerator twice.

"You're going to hurt yourself," Daniel said from the doorway, watching her crouch to reach a jar of olives that had migrated to the back.

"I'm going to find the good mustard. I bought the good mustard."

He came in and moved the milk aside, and there it was, hiding behind a container of leftover rice neither of them would admit to having forgotten. Rosa took it with the small triumph of a woman vindicated.

The apartment smelled like garlic and browning onions. Daniel had started the sauce at two o'clock because he believed, with the conviction of a man who had once read something about it, that tomato sauce required four hours minimum. Rosa thought this was nonsense but had stopped saying so around year six.

"Do we have enough chairs?" she asked.

"We have four chairs and a stool."

"We need six."

Daniel wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder. "I'll get the folding ones from the hall closet. The ones with the flowers."

"Those chairs are hideous."

"Those chairs are seating."

She laughed and swatted at him as he passed. He kissed the top of her head without breaking stride, the kind of gesture worn smooth by repetition, and disappeared down the hallway. She heard the closet door stick, then give.

By six-fifteen the table was set with the plates that matched and two that almost did. Rosa lit a candle. Daniel tasted the sauce, added salt, tasted again, added more.

"It's good," he said.

"It's always good."

"It's better this time."

The doorbell rang. Rosa untied her apron and threw it over a chair; Daniel turned the burner to low. They looked at each other for half a second, the way people do before a door opens.


The Reyes kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt toast by four o'clock.

"You said you'd handle the bread," Diane said, waving a dish towel at the smoke detector, which had not yet gone off but was clearly considering it.

"I did handle it," Marcus said. "I handled it right into the broiler and then I got distracted by the thing with the chairs."

The thing with the chairs was that they only had four matching ones, and six people were coming. Marcus had spent twenty minutes arranging and rearranging, finally deciding that the two mismatched ones would go at the ends, where they'd look intentional.

Diane pulled a second baguette from the freezer. "Nobody's going to notice the chairs."

"Ellen notices everything."

"Ellen loves us. She'd sit on a bucket."

He laughed and went back to the salad, tearing lettuce with more care than it required. He'd been the one to suggest the dinner, back in October, when the idea of company had seemed abstract and pleasant. Now that it was here, he found he was nervous in a way he hadn't expected — the good kind, the kind that came from wanting an evening to go well.

Diane set the table with the plates from the wedding, the ones they used maybe twice a year. She lit two candles, blew one out, decided that was silly, and lit it again.

"Wine's in the fridge," she said. "The white, anyway. Did you get red?"

Marcus held up a bottle without turning around.

At six-fifteen, headlights swept across the front window. Diane smoothed her shirt. Marcus wiped his hands on a towel and threw it toward the counter, missing.

"Ready?" she said.

"No," he said, and opened the door anyway, already smiling, already saying their names.


The Delgados had been arguing about the tablecloth since four o'clock.

"The linen one has a stain," Marisol said, holding it up to the kitchen window. Late afternoon light came through the fabric and found the faint amber ring near one corner, evidence of a wine glass set down carelessly two Thanksgivings ago.

"Nobody looks at tablecloths," Andrés said. He was crouched in front of the oven, peering through the glass at a chicken that had another forty minutes to go. "They look at the food. And I'm telling you, this bird is going to be dry."

"It's not going to be dry."

"It looks dry."

"You can't see dry through a window."

He stood up, knees cracking, and took the tablecloth from her hands. He turned it around, folded the stained corner under, and laid it on the table so the flaw disappeared into a pleat. "There. Solved."

Marisol went back to the vegetables. She had been slicing carrots into coins and had lost track somewhere around fifty. Andrés came up behind her, reached past her shoulder, and stole one.

"Those are for the roasting pan."

"There are two hundred of them."

"There are sixty."

He ate it anyway and went to find candles in the hall closet, where he knocked over a box of Christmas ornaments and swore at it. Marisol heard him from the kitchen and didn't offer to help, which she considered a kindness.

By six-thirty the table was set. Four plates, mismatched wine glasses, the folded tablecloth. Andrés had put on a clean shirt and was standing in the doorway looking at the room the way a man looks at something he's finished building.

"It's good," Marisol said.

"It's all right."

The doorbell rang. She wiped her hands, he straightened a fork, and they went to answer it together.


The first thing Nadia did when she got home was open every window in the apartment, because Theo had been braising short ribs since two in the afternoon and the whole place smelled like a butcher shop had caught fire in a good way.

"Too much?" he asked, not looking up from the pot.

"No. It's perfect. But Ellen's coming, and she gets headaches."

He wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder and went to help her with the grocery bags. Wine, two bunches of dahlias with their stems already going soft, a wedge of something expensive she'd been talked into by the man at the counter. She'd meant to be home an hour ago. The meeting had run long, the way meetings did.

"I set the table," Theo said. "But I couldn't find the good napkins."

"Because I put them somewhere clever."

"That's what I assumed."

She found them eventually, in the linen closet behind the extra sheets, folded into a shape she no longer remembered the reason for. Theo took the flowers, trimmed the stems at an angle under running water, and jammed them into a pitcher because the vase had broken in March and neither of them had gotten around to replacing it.

They moved around each other in the narrow kitchen with the unthinking choreography of long practice — he stepped left, she ducked under his arm, he handed her a spoon before she asked. She tasted the sauce and made a face.

"More vinegar," she said.

"I told you."

"You didn't tell me anything."

"I thought it very loudly."

At six forty, they stood back and looked at the table: mismatched chairs, the pitcher of drooping dahlias, six places set. Theo turned the lamp down. Nadia straightened a fork.

Then the buzzer rang, and they both went to answer it.


The Nakamura-Reyes house smelled like garlic by four o'clock.

Dana had gotten home first and started the sauce, standing at the stove in her work clothes because she'd meant to change and then hadn't. She tasted from a wooden spoon, added salt, tasted again. The radio was on low, some station that played music from before either of them was born.

Owen came in through the garage with two bags of ice and a bottle of wine he'd been talked into by a man at the store who had opinions about Rioja. He set everything on the counter and looked at the sauce.

"Too thin," he said.

"It's not done."

"I'm just saying what I see."

She handed him the spoon. He tasted it, made a face that meant she was right, and went to find the good glasses, the six that had survived from a set of eight. One of them had a chip on the rim they always gave to whoever was drinking water.

They worked around each other in the kitchen the way people do after enough years — she stepped back without looking and he was already gone, sliding past with the cutting board. He chopped parsley badly. She didn't say anything about it.

At five-thirty Owen went to shower and came back in a shirt she liked, and she told him so, and he pretended not to care. Dana changed too, finally, and put on earrings and then took one off and switched it for a different one, which Owen noticed and did not mention.

They stood in the living room and looked at it. A blanket on the couch that shouldn't be there. He folded it. She turned on the lamp in the corner instead of the overhead light, and the room got softer.

"Okay," she said.

The doorbell rang at six.


The Reyes kitchen smelled like garlic and burnt toast by five-thirty, which Daniel insisted was a good sign.

"Burnt toast is not a sign," Marisol said, scraping the blackened slices into the bin. "It's a warning."

"It's atmosphere." He was wrestling with a bag of ice that had fused into one solid brick. He set it on the counter and hit it with the heel of his hand until it cracked into something usable.

They had four people coming: the Okonkwos from two streets over, and Jenna and her new boyfriend, whom neither of them had met. Marisol had spent the afternoon deciding whether to make the lamb, then made chicken instead, which was what she'd been going to make all along.

"Do we have candles?" she asked.

"We have candles from Christmas."

"Christmas candles are red."

"So it'll look festive."

She gave him a look and he went to the hall closet anyway, returning with two white tapers still in their plastic sleeve, found behind a box of extension cords. He held them up like a hunting trophy.

At six, Marisol changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one. Daniel put on music, then turned it down, then turned it down again. He kept moving the chairs a quarter inch, as if the table could be made perfect through small adjustments.

"Sit down," she told him. "You're going to wear a path in the floor."

"I'm nervous about the boyfriend."

"Why? You'll like him or you won't."

"That's exactly it."

She handed him a glass of wine and took one herself, and for a minute they stood together in the doorway looking at the set table, the mismatched napkins, the red candles she'd decided to use after all. Outside, a car door shut.

"Here we go," Daniel said, and went to answer it.


Marguerite decided at four o'clock that the good tablecloth was a mistake, then changed her mind twice more while the oven preheated. Dennis found her holding it up to the window light, checking for the wine stain she'd sworn she'd gotten out last spring.

"It's fine," he said.

"It's under the candlestick, is where it is." She folded it back over her arm. "You didn't get the ice."

He hadn't. He put on his shoes and drove to the store on the corner, and while he was there he bought a bag of lemons because she liked them floating in the water pitcher, and a bunch of tulips that were mostly still closed. When he came back she had music on and was crushing garlic with the flat of a knife, striking the blade with her palm harder than seemed necessary.

"Tulips," he said, holding them up.

"Put them in the blue one. Not the tall one, they'll flop."

He arranged them badly and she came over and rearranged them without comment, which was its own kind of comment. Then she went back to the stove and he set the table, counting out six of everything, holding each glass to the light the way she'd taught him twenty-some years ago and he'd never stopped doing.

The chicken went in. The kitchen got warm. Dennis opened the window over the sink and the evening came in smelling like cut grass from somebody's yard.

"Do you think they'll want the salad first or with?" she asked.

"With."

"That's what I thought."

At six-forty she went to change her shirt, and he stood alone a minute in the dining room, looking at the table. It looked like company was coming. He straightened one fork a quarter inch and turned the porch light on before she could remind him.


The invitations had said seven, which meant Priya started cooking at four and Daniel started cleaning at four-thirty, after she reminded him twice.

"The good glasses or the everyday ones?" he called from the dining room.

"Good ones. But check them—they've been in the cabinet since Christmas."

He held each one up to the window light and found two with water spots, which he took to the sink and washed by hand while she reduced something on the stove that smelled like garlic and white wine. The kitchen radio played a station neither of them had chosen, left over from some morning weeks ago.

"Miriam's bringing dessert," Priya said. "So don't panic about the tart."

"I wasn't going to make the tart."

"You were absolutely going to make the tart. I saw you looking at the recipe card."

He didn't deny it. He dried the glasses, set the table, then rearranged the chairs twice because the fourth one wobbled and he wanted the wobbly one for himself. She came out to look and moved the candles three inches to the left, and he let her, because she was usually right about that kind of thing.

At six she went to change and came back in the green shirt he liked. He'd put on a clean sweater and forgotten to comb his hair, and she fixed it with her fingers in the hallway while he stood still and let her.

"There's flour on your ear," she said.

"There's flour everywhere. It's a whole situation."

The doorbell rang at ten past seven. They looked at each other in the small pause before answering—the last quiet second of the evening—and she squeezed his forearm once, and he opened the door, and their friends came in loud and cold from outside, apologizing for being late, carrying wine and a tart in a white box.


The Vasquez-Lindström household smelled like burnt garlic, which was Nora's fault, and she owned it immediately.

"I walked away for thirty seconds," she said, scraping the blackened cloves into the trash. "Thirty."

"You walked away to look at your phone." Owen didn't look up from the cutting board, where he was working through a mountain of shallots with the slow precision of a man who had never once been rushed by anything. "There's more garlic in the drawer."

She found it, peeled it, started again. Outside, the November dark had come down early and the kitchen window had gone black and reflective, so she could see the two of them doubled there — her in the apron with the torn pocket, him in the sweater he'd owned since before they met.

"Did you text Priya about the shellfish thing?"

"I texted her. It's Dev who can't have shellfish, not Priya, and there's no shellfish in anything, so."

"There's fish sauce in the dressing."

Owen paused. "Fish sauce is fish."

"Fish sauce is anchovies."

"Anchovies are fish."

"Shellfish, Owen."

He set down the knife, wiped his hands, and went to find a different dressing recipe, muttering. Nora smiled at the window-reflection of him going.

By seven the table was set with the good plates and the mismatched water glasses they'd never gotten around to replacing. Owen lit the two candles that had been in the drawer since somebody's birthday. Nora changed her shirt twice and settled on the first one.

"It looks nice," she said, standing in the doorway.

"It looks like we tried."

"We did try."

"That's my point." He straightened one fork a quarter inch. "Don't tell them about the garlic."

The doorbell rang. She went to answer it; he stayed behind a moment, turning down the music, then followed.


The Ferrantes had been arguing about the tablecloth for eleven minutes.

"The linen one has a wine stain," Dolores said, holding it up to the kitchen window like an X-ray. "Right there. From the Okonkwos."

"Nobody looks at the tablecloth." Marcus was crouched in front of the oven, basting a chicken with a turkey baster he'd bought specifically because the regular spoon method had produced what Dolores once called "the saddest bird in Ohio."

"People look at everything. That's what dinner parties are."

He straightened up, knees popping. "Then put a candle over it."

She considered this. It was, annoyingly, a good idea. She retrieved the beeswax pillar from the hall closet and set it dead center over the stain, then adjusted it half an inch to the left, then back.

By six-fifteen, the kitchen smelled like rosemary and browning skin. Marcus had moved on to the potatoes, which he was mashing with more force than strictly necessary, the way he did when he was nervous about company. Dolores counted out forks. Six. Then eight, because Renata always brought her sister.

"Did you call about the ice?"

"I got ice."

"You got ice or you thought about ice?"

He held up a bag, dripping, from behind his back like a magician. She laughed despite herself, and he grinned, pleased with the timing of it.

At six-forty she put on the record she always put on—something with horns, something that made the room feel like it had more corners than it did. Marcus untied his apron, hung it on the pantry door, and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow. He surveyed the table: the candle, the mismatched water glasses, the bread she'd bought that morning still warm-ish in its paper.

"It's good," he said.

"It's fine," she said, which meant the same thing.

The doorbell rang at six-fifty. Neither of them moved for a second, just looked at each other across the small bright kitchen, and then they both did.


The Marchetti kitchen had two cooks in it, which was one more than the kitchen was designed for.

"You're crowding the stove," Nora said, sliding a pan of root vegetables onto the lower rack.

"I'm not crowding. I'm supervising." Dev leaned past her to check the roast, and she elbowed him, gently, in the ribs. He staggered with theatrical injury against the refrigerator, where a magnet shaped like a lobster fell to the floor.

"That's the third time this month."

"It's a bad magnet."

They had four people coming at seven: the Okonkwos from down the street, and Marisol, who had been Nora's roommate in a series of terrible apartments a long time ago, and Marisol's new boyfriend, whom neither of them had met. Dev had opinions about the boyfriend already, based entirely on the fact that he was a competitive cyclist.

"Be nice," Nora said.

"I'm going to be extremely nice. I'm going to ask him detailed questions about gear ratios."

She laughed and handed him a head of romaine. He washed it leaf by leaf, which she found unbearably slow and also, secretly, endearing. Twenty-one years, and he still washed lettuce like a man defusing something.

At six-fifteen she went to change and came back in the green sweater. Dev looked up from the cutting board and didn't say anything, just raised his eyebrows in a way she'd known since she was twenty-six.

"Don't," she said.

"I didn't."

"You were going to."

He set out the good glasses, the ones from his mother, counting them twice because he always miscounted. Nora lit the candle on the table, blew out the match, and stood for a second in the small quiet before the doorbell.

"Wine's open?" she said.

"Wine's been open for an hour. I've been testing it."

Headlights swung across the front window. They looked at each other, and Dev went to get the door.


The Kellermans had four hours and a mismatched set of dinner plates.

"We could use the good ones," Dana said, standing on a kitchen chair with her hand deep in the cabinet above the refrigerator. "Assuming they're still up here and not in the garage with your grandmother's ice bucket."

"They're in the garage," Ray said. He was slicing onions with the deliberate, wrist-heavy technique of a man who had watched exactly one cooking video and taken it seriously. "But nobody's going to look at plates. They're going to look at whether the food is hot."

She climbed down anyway and went out to the garage, and came back eight minutes later with a cardboard box that smelled like dust and cold concrete. Inside, wrapped in newspaper from an election two cycles old, were eight white plates with a thin blue ring around the rim.

"Wedding gift," she said. "From the Hutchinsons, I think."

"The Hutchinsons gave us a lamp."

"Then somebody else." She ran them under hot water one at a time, drying each with a dish towel, lining them up on the counter like something being inspected.

Ray got the chicken in the oven at four-fifteen, which was later than he'd planned, and then spent twenty minutes trying to find a station on the radio that wasn't commercials. Dana moved the mail off the dining table and into a drawer, wiped the table, then took the mail back out because she remembered a bill in the stack.

At five-thirty the house smelled like garlic and rosemary. Ray stood in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder and looked at the table—the plates, the folded napkins, two candles she'd found in a drawer and lit even though it wasn't dark yet.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like we tried."

"That's the same thing."

The doorbell rang at six-o-two. Dana blew out one candle that was leaning, and went to answer it.


The rain had stopped an hour ago, leaving the driveway shining, and Rosalind stood at the kitchen window watching a neighbor's cat pick its way across the wet grass. Behind her, Theo was arguing with the oven.

"It says preheat, and it's been preheating for eleven minutes."

"Give it another five. It always sulks when it's damp out."

He shut the door with his hip and turned to the counter, where two chickens waited under a haze of paprika. Rosalind had rubbed them down before her shower, and he could smell the garlic on the towel she'd left by the sink. He slid lemon halves into the cavities and tied the legs with the clumsy double knot he'd used for twenty-two years, the one she still teased him about.

"Marguerite doesn't eat fennel," Rosalind said.

"Since when?"

"Since the thing at the lake house. She said it tastes like toothpaste."

Theo sighed and picked the fennel out of the salad, one frond at a time, dropping the pieces into the compost bin. Rosalind moved past him with a stack of plates, bumping his shoulder on purpose, and set the table with the plain white dishes instead of the good ones, because the good ones made people careful.

By seven the house had that particular warmth — the oven going, a candle lit on the sideboard, music low enough that no one would have to shout. Theo poured himself a finger of wine and then poured one for her without asking.

"Napkins," she said.

"Drawer."

"The cloth ones."

He found them, folded them badly, and she straightened each as she passed. Outside, headlights swung into the driveway, and they looked at each other for a second — that quick, private check — before Theo went to open the door.


The invitation had gone out three weeks earlier, and now Priya stood in the kitchen doorway assessing the damage.

"You said you'd handle the appetizers," she said.

Daniel looked up from the cutting board, where a mound of unevenly chopped shallots sat beside a recipe printed off the internet, already spotted with olive oil. "I *am* handling the appetizers. This is the handling."

"That's a lot of shallots for six people."

"The recipe was ambiguous."

She moved past him to the oven, checking the chicken. It had another forty minutes at least, which meant they had time, though not as much as she wanted. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and started clearing the mail off the dining table—a stack that had been accumulating since some indeterminate point in the fall.

"Do we own six matching wine glasses?" Daniel asked.

"We own four. And two from the set your mother gave us."

"So we own six wine glasses."

"We own six wine glasses that don't match."

He shrugged, scraping the shallots into a pan. "Nobody's grading us."

Priya set out the plates, stepped back, adjusted one, then stepped back again. Through the window over the sink, the sky had gone the particular blue it turned in the twenty minutes before dark, and she could smell the shallots starting to soften and sweeten.

"That smells right, actually," she said.

"Don't sound so surprised."

She found the candles in the drawer beneath the silverware, two half-burned tapers, and set them in the middle of the table. Daniel came out with a bowl of olives, put it down, moved it two inches to the left, and looked at her.

"Good?"

"Good," she said, and went to change her shirt before the doorbell rang.


The rain had stopped an hour ago, leaving the kitchen window fogged at the edges. Marisol stood at the counter with a paring knife, working the skin off a butternut squash in long ribbons that curled into the compost bin. Behind her, Ray was on his knees in front of the oven, adjusting the rack, muttering that the bottom element ran hot and always had.

"Move it up one," she said without turning around.

"I did move it up one. Now it's too close to the top."

"Then move it back."

He sat back on his heels and laughed, which was how most of their disagreements about the oven ended. He got up, wiped his hands on the dish towel hanging from the drawer pull, and went to find the extra chairs in the hall closet. There were only four chairs at the table and six people coming, so the folding ones came out twice a year and lived the rest of the time behind the vacuum cleaner.

Marisol slid the squash into a roasting pan and drizzled it with oil. She tasted the vinaigrette off a spoon, made a face, added more mustard, tasted it again. Better.

Ray came back with the chairs under one arm and a tablecloth he'd found in the linen closet, which he held up questioningly.

"The stain's on the underside," she said. "Just flip it."

He set the table while she roasted. They'd worked out this division years ago without ever naming it: she cooked, he arranged. He folded the napkins into rough triangles and put out the good glasses, the ones with the slight ripple in the stems.

At six-fifteen he opened a bottle of wine to let it breathe and poured two small glasses first, one for each of them.

"To nobody being late," he said.

"To nobody being early," she said, and they touched glasses in the quiet kitchen.


Marisol found the good tablecloth folded at the bottom of the linen closet, still creased from the last time they'd used it, two Thanksgivings ago. She shook it out over the dining table while Dev knelt at the oven, squinting at a chicken he had rubbed with more paprika than the recipe called for.

"It says forty minutes," he said. "It's been forty minutes."

"Then take it out."

"It doesn't look done."

She came and looked. It looked done to her, but she had learned not to say so in the moment; he would only leave it in longer out of principle. Instead she handed him the meat thermometer from the drawer, and he pushed it into the thickest part of the thigh and made a satisfied noise.

They had invited four people. Two were friends from the neighborhood, and two were a couple Dev knew from the years he'd spent commuting, whom Marisol had met exactly twice and liked better each time. She counted out plates and found that one had a chip in the rim, so she put that one at her own place.

"Do we have candles?" she called.

"We have birthday candles."

"That's not the same thing."

He found two tapers in a box in the garage, dusty and slightly bent, and she straightened them by warming them between her palms. The house began to smell like garlic and hot paprika. Dev put music on, something instrumental, and turned it down twice because she said it was too loud, and then a third time because he agreed.

At ten to seven she changed out of the shirt she'd been cooking in. Dev swept the front step. When the first knock came they were both standing in the kitchen, not doing anything in particular, and they looked at each other with the small conspiratorial pleasure of people about to be hospitable.


The Okonkwo-Reyes household smelled like burnt garlic at 4:40 in the afternoon, which Daniel considered a promising sign. "It's supposed to do that," he said, scraping the pan into the trash. "It's a technique."

"It's a technique for starting over," Marisol said. She was standing on a kitchen chair, reaching into the high cabinet for the good serving bowl, the blue one they'd bought on a trip eleven years ago and used maybe four times since. Dust came down with it. She blew at it and coughed.

They had ninety minutes. The Feldmans always arrived exactly on time, and Trish had said she might bring her sister, which meant six people at a table that comfortably held five.

Daniel started the garlic again, lower heat this time, watching it the way you watch something you've already ruined once. Marisol washed the bowl, dried it, and set it down. Then she went into the dining room and stood there a moment, assessing.

"The folding chair," she called. "From the garage."

"It squeaks."

"Then bring the WD-40 too."

He went. The garage was cold and full of the accumulated evidence of two people who never quite finished projects — half a bookshelf, a bicycle with one wheel. He found the chair behind a stack of paint cans and carried it in, and Marisol met him at the door with the oil and a rag, and they worked on the hinge together for a minute without talking, her holding, him spraying, the smell sharp and chemical over the garlic.

"Better," she said.

"Marginally."

At 5:50 the table was set, mismatched napkins folded into something like elegance, the blue bowl in the center holding salad they'd both chopped. Daniel poured two small glasses of wine and handed her one.

"To marginal improvement," he said.

Marisol clinked. The doorbell rang four minutes early.


The Threat of Rain

Nadia decided at four o'clock that the tablecloth was wrong, and by four-fifteen she had pulled every linen out of the hall closet and spread them across the couch like a fabric shop going out of business.

"The blue one," Owen said, passing through with a bag of ice. "The blue one has that stain."

"Nobody looks at stains."

"You just spent ten minutes looking at it."

He set the ice in the cooler on the back porch and stood a moment assessing the sky, which had gone the color of dishwater. The forecast had promised clear through midnight. The forecast had also promised this for the past three Saturdays, and the porch furniture still bore the water rings to prove otherwise.

Inside, Nadia had committed to the blue and was folding the rejects with the brisk violence of someone running out of time. Owen took the stack from her arms.

"Chicken," she said.

"It's been in since three."

"You basted it?"

"I basted it. I basted it twice, and I'll baste it again in ten minutes, and if you ask me a third time I'm going to eat it in the garage by myself."

She laughed, which was what he'd wanted, and went to find the good glasses—six of them, though only five had survived the last dinner party, so someone would be drinking from a jar and pretending not to mind. Probably Owen. It was usually Owen.

At six he lit the candles. At six-oh-five she blew two of them out because the smell was fighting the rosemary. They stood together in the doorway looking at the table, the mismatched chairs, the folded napkins, the one bare spot where a sixth glass should have been.

"It looks nice," she said.

"It looks like us," he said, and then the doorbell rang and neither of them had changed their shirts.


The Ferraro-Lindqvists had exactly ninety minutes before the doorbell would ring, and Marguerite had already burned the first batch of garlic.

"It's fine," Piotr said, scraping the blackened cloves into the bin. "It's rustic. It's char."

"It's carbon." She reached past him for the second head of garlic, pressing it flat with the heel of her hand. "Did you find the extra chairs?"

"The extra chairs are in the garage behind the kayak, which is behind the box of your mother's Christmas things, which you promised to deal with in April."

"April of which year?"

He was already heading out, still in his socks, and she heard the garage door groan and then a series of thuds that she decided not to investigate. She set the water on to boil and pulled the roast from the oven to rest, tenting it in foil, and stood for a moment breathing in the rosemary smell of it, satisfied.

Piotr returned with two folding chairs and a cobweb in his hair. "There's a fourth one, but a mouse has been living in it."

"Then we have five chairs and we've invited four people."

"Someone will have to sit on the good chair and feel guilty."

He set the table while she finished the sauce, and they moved around each other in the narrow kitchen with the practiced choreography of two people who had been colliding in it for eleven years — a hand on a hip to signal *behind you*, a shoulder turned, a spoon offered without a word and tasted without a question.

"More salt," she said.

"Absolutely not."

"Piotr."

"Fine. A little more salt."

At six fifty-five she changed her shirt and he lit the two candles that had been in the drawer since somebody's birthday. They stood surveying it together — the mismatched chairs, the good plates, the bread still warm.

"It looks nice," he said.

"It looks like us," she said.

The doorbell rang.