myownsuperintendent asked:
wtfmulder answered:
It’s just Charlie, Bill Jr. and her at the steakhouse, Billy’s choice, and she hadn’t had the energy to fight it. It’s already too much, the way he doesn’t look at her. On this day he’s more like Ahab than she’s ever seen him.
Charlie, who gave up peacemaking long ago, doesn’t eat. “This is disrespectful,” he says, holding a cloth napkin between prayer hands. So like mom, with that gesture, when she’s had a glass of red wine and tells stories about about her love at sea. Charlie, Dana thinks, is the second person she’s ever known to say no whenever he feels like it. The first one died in her living room.
“What is?” Bill Jr. asks, voice hard, grease shining at the corner of his thin lips. He’s as red as the myoglobin of the steak. Rare. Ahab only ever let them eat it rare. It’d be a waste, he’d say, of meat we already can’t afford. And Dana hates it raw, but she’d gulp down every bite with a smile, shivering when it’d drip down her mouth and make her lips wet.
“Melissa was a vegetarian,” Charlie says. His fingers curl into the napkin, bunching it up, not looking at her nor Bill Jr., his least favorite siblings.
Bill Jr. takes a second, then looks at Dana. “She’s not here, Charlie.”
And so, caught between the brother who blames her for her sister’s death and the brother who despises her for never standing up, Dana chews at the steak she’d ordered well-done, secretly, when Bill Jr. had been in the bathroom.
