The air in the dining room had the specific, brittle quality of sugar glass—beautiful to look at, but ready to shatter into a thousand cutting shards at the slightest pressure.
I sat at the mahogany table, a piece of furniture my parents had bought twenty years ago to signal their arrival into the upper middle class. It was the altar upon which most of my childhood dreams had been dissected, critiqued, and found wanting. Tonight, however, the atmosphere was different. There was a celebratory roast chicken in the center, a bottle of Cabernet breathing on the sideboard, and an uncharacteristically warm smile on my father’s face.
