The Plate Comes Out Before She Does
The good plate has been in the cabinet since the last visit. Not the everyday steel, not the chipped ceramic that everyone else uses without thinking. The bone china with the blue border, the one that came down from someone's mother. It appears on the table before she has taken off her sandals, and nobody announces it. That is the first thing to understand: the gesture is not performed for her. It is performed around her, the way you adjust the furniture in a room where someone important is about to sit.
