She always liked to set up the dining room ahead of time to lighten her workload when her guests arrived. The fine family china and silver were on the table tonight, and everything sparkled in the late afternoon sun filtering through the dining room windows. Grace smiled as she walked around the table, looking at the homemade nameplates she’d painted the year she took ceramic classes. Charles’s nameplate still sat at the head of the table. Grace hadn’t been able to persuade Mike, her eldest, to assume his father’s place there yet. Charles’s place continued to be set up—empty—in respect to the family head, lost unexpectedly nearly three years ago to a sudden, massive heart attack. She touched her fingers to Charles’s nameplate. “Well, Charles, all the children and the grandchildren will be here tonight. I guess you remember it’s Margaret’s twenty-first birthday. How about that? Our baby is twenty-one. It just doesn’t seem possible.” Grace and Charles had raised four children together: Mike, now thirty, Ken, twenty-eight, Elaine, twenty-six, and Margaret, twenty-one today.
