I bought a roast too large for three people because Nadine had said she could come on Sunday. It was October, cool enough to have the oven running without opening every window, and I had persuaded myself that a meal with all four of us would establish something. Not a reunion, exactly. Proof that we could still perform the ordinary parts of being a family if I arranged them carefully enough.
Ruth peeled carrots with more waste than carrot coming off under the blade. Tessa did her schoolwork at the far end of the table. I asked her to move it before her mother arrived, and she looked at the clock rather than at me. That irritated me until I remembered she had heard promises about visits before. I lowered the oven and polished a water mark off Nadine's glass.
Beside the telephone lay an acceptance form for an out-of-town instructor-training placement. Juniper Practical School had passed my name along. It wasn't a permanent position or a promise of one, but it was supervised training on equipment I couldn't afford to buy, and it would have given my applications something besides years of doing the same small job well.
I had left the form there for Nadine to see. I wanted us to work out the household arrangements over coffee after supper, in the restored ease I was cooking toward. The reply was due soon. Every day I had delayed answering had made the opportunity seem less like an offer and more like a test I was avoiding.
The telephone rang before I took the roast out. It was Nadine, using the route we had agreed on for ordinary changes.
"I can't come today," she said. "I'm sorry. I know you've started."
I looked at the clock as though she might dispute it. "We were going to eat in twenty minutes."
"I know."
"Can you tell me whether another time today will work?"
"No. Not today." She waited, and I could hear her breathing. "Please tell the girls I'm sorry."
I said I would and put down the receiver. Ruth stopped peeling. Tessa didn't ask who it had been. I told them their mother couldn't come, then lifted the roast from the oven with both hands because I didn't trust myself to set it down gently with one.
"Do we wait?" Ruth asked.
"No. We eat while it's hot."
Tessa carried in the vegetables and sat at her own place. Nadine's plate remained untouched. For a moment I resented the girl for not taking it away, not making some small gesture that would save me from looking at it. Then I recognized what I was asking: that she make my disappointment easier before she had even eaten her dinner.
We talked about Ruth's reading and a broken clasp on Tessa's bag. The food was good, which seemed almost insulting. Afterward I wrapped the remaining meat while the girls washed up, and the training form lay where I had placed it, still waiting for an evening that hadn't occurred.
On Monday I called the number on the form. I asked whether there was a way to attend without staying away from home. There wasn't. I asked whether I could defer, and was told another opening couldn't be promised. The person answering was patient, but patience did not produce a spare adult in my kitchen.
"Then I have to decline," I said.
I wrote the same answer on the form. I didn't put down that my daughters needed me. That was true, but it was not the whole truth, and I had begun to dislike how easily their names could make my decisions sound compulsory.
When Nadine and I next spoke directly, I told her what I had done. "I turned down the training placement. I couldn't arrange the household around it with the uncertainty we have now."
"Ellis, you should have told me sooner."
"I should. I kept waiting for an ordinary Sunday to ask you. But I need you to understand that this costs something besides a meal."
She asked whether the place was still available. I told her I had already declined. I didn't accuse her of taking it from me, and I didn't let her call it something I could simply do another time. We stayed on the telephone until both of us had stopped looking for a sentence that would make the loss smaller.