And the moment I did, the blood in my veins instantly, violently boiled.
Eleanor hadn’t just placed him at a table in the back of the room. She hadn’t just seated him with the distant, undesirable cousins.
She had seated him entirely alone.
He was placed at a tiny, wobbly, high-top cocktail table that had clearly been dragged in from the hallway at the last minute. The table was wedged tightly into a dark, drafty corner, directly between the swinging doors of the busy catering kitchen and a massive, stainless-steel industrial trash receptacle used by the bussers to scrape dirty plates.
Arthur was eighty-two years old. He was wearing a faded, slightly oversized grey suit that looked as though it hadn’t been tailored in a decade. He was sitting on a hard wooden chair, his hands resting quietly on his lap, staring blankly at the empty, white porcelain plate in front of him.
Just a few feet away, a young waiter hurriedly scraped the remains of a half-eaten filet mignon and mashed potatoes directly into the trash bin beside him, the loud, wet
thwack
