I liked when my mother had ideas about eating at the coffee table. Us, sitting at the dining table, and she would pick up her plate and walk across the room. I would pick up my plate and follow her. We would put our plates on the coffee table and pull it closer, close enough to touch our knees. There was a little shelf below the table, a kind of undertable, and that was where we placed our tall, cool drinks. This was the way we ate dinner, just the two of us, creating rings of condensation, wet little galaxies where there had been none. “Much better,” my mother said.
