What Remains at the Table

The restaurant was nearly empty, just the hum of refrigeration and the clink of silverware against porcelain. Elena sat across from David, watching him push a wilted spinach leaf around his plate with the kind of deliberate concentration usually reserved for diffusing bombs. Three years of marriage, and here they were, having the conversation they'd both been avoiding since the second miscarriage.

"You haven't touched your food," she said, not because she cared about the salmon, but because the silence was becoming heavier than the grief wedged between them.

David looked up, his eyes rimmed with red. "I'm not hungry." He reached for his water glass, condensation slick on his fingers, and took a long swallow. "Are you?"

"No."

They'd stopped being hungry somewhere around the sixth month of trying, then again after the first D&C, then completely after the second. Appetite was a luxury for people whose lives moved forward in predictable increments. Theirs had stalled in a sterile doctor's office with a ultrasound technician who wouldn't meet their eyes.

"My mother called again," David said suddenly. "She wants to know if we're still coming for Christmas."

Elena felt something sharp rise in her throat. "What did you tell her?"

"That we'd see. That we're working through some things." He laughed, a dry, humorless sound. "She said she's making that spinach lasagna you used to love. As if comfort food still works. As if anything works."

The waiter appeared, refilling David's water glass with practiced efficiency, sensing the tension and wisely saying nothing. Elena watched the water spiral into the glass, thinking about how they were like that — vessels slowly being filled to the brimming point, and nobody was measuring how much they could actually hold before spilling over.

"I don't think I can do Christmas," she said finally. "I can't sit there and pretend. I can't watch your sister's kids open presents and smile like my insides aren't hollowed out."

David nodded slowly. He reached for his hat on the empty chair beside him — that worn brown fedora he'd worn on their first date, back when they were different people with lighter hearts. He put it on, tilting the brim low over his eyes.

"I know," he said. "I wasn't asking you to pretend anymore. I was asking if you're staying. If this," he gestured between them, "is still something you want."

Elena looked at the spinach on her plate, at the water in her glass, at the hat shielding her husband's face. The pieces of a life they'd built, suddenly strange and unfamiliar.

"I don't know," she said. And for the first time in three years, it was the truth.