Then there was after-dinner dark. This was the time after she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She would sit on the sofa between her mom and dad and watch one of the movies that they pushed into the little machine that sat beneath the television. After-dinner dark was made up of hazy purples and navy blues and gave her an all-is-right-with-the-world feeling. Watching TV together, sometimes sharing a bowl of popcorn, told the girl that her family wasn’t all that different than the ones in the movies.
