The Slow Parts: She Said She Was Fine At Dinner

She ordered the salmon. She laughed at the right times. She was so good at this by now.

She orders the salmon.

Not because she wants it. Because she did the math in the parking lot before they even walked in. She pulled up the menu on her phone while her husband was getting the kids out of the car and she scanned it fast, the way she always does now, finding the thing that makes the most sense, the thing she can eat without having to explain herself or do complicated math in her head at the table with everyone watching.

Salmon. Done. She put her phone away before anyone saw.

Inside it’s loud and warm and the kind of restaurant her family likes, the one with the big booths and the bread that comes out hot and the candles that are really just little fake flames but still make everything look softer. Her sister is already talking. Her brother-in-law is already flagging down the waiter. The kids want lemonade and then immediately want to know if they can have dessert and her mom is asking if anyone looked at the menu yet.

She already looked at the menu.

She orders the salmon and a side salad, dressing on the side, and the waiter nods and moves on and not a single person at the table notices anything. That’s the part she has gotten so good at she doesn’t even notice herself doing it anymore. The ordering something safe. The eating slowly. The laughing at the right times. The refilling everyone’s water glass so her hands have somewhere to be.

Her sister gets the carbonara. Her mom gets the chicken marsala. Her husband orders the ribeye without looking up from the kids’ menu he’s coloring with her youngest.

She gets the salmon.

Halfway through dinner her mom asks how she’s doing. “With everything”. She says it like that, “with everything”, the way moms do when they mean something specific but don’t want to say it out loud at the table.

Fine, she says. Really good actually.

She smiles when she says it. Not a fake smile, or maybe a little bit of a fake smile, but the kind that comes so naturally now it doesn’t feel fake anymore. It just feels like her face doing what her face does at dinner.

Fine. Really good actually.

The truth is she’s down four pounds since she saw her mom last and she’s also been waking up at 3am for two weeks straight and her injection day this week left her nauseated until noon and she cried in the Target parking lot on Tuesday for a reason she still hasn’t fully figured out. But the salmon is actually good and her nephew is telling a story about something that happened at school and it’s funny, genuinely funny, and she laughs for real this time and forgets for a second.

Just a second.

Dessert comes for the kids. Chocolate cake with the candle because it’s her nephew’s actual birthday, that’s why they’re all here, and everyone sings and her nephew looks mortified and delighted at the same time and she takes the picture because she’s always the one who takes the picture and it’s a good one, she can tell before she even looks at it.

On the drive home she’s quiet. Her husband asks if she’s okay. She says she’s tired. He nods and turns the music up a little and she watches the highway lights go by.

She is tired. That part was true.

She gets home and logs her meal and puts her phone on the charger and sits on the edge of the bed in the dark for a minute. Not crying. Not thinking anything in particular. Just sitting.

Then she gets up. Washes her face. Brushes her teeth.

Goes to bed.

Tomorrow she has her check-in and she’ll log her weight and she’ll keep going. She always keeps going. Nobody at dinner would ever guess how much energy that takes.

still in the quiet with you,
» Nyk

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