IN THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE (IN NEED OF COVER)

Table part:1

The mother slapped the plates down on the table in a way that all angry mothers do. The father, folding up his newspaper, pretended not to notice. Or maybe he didn't notice. Maybe he was too busy thinking about other things. About a story he'd just read in the paper about a man who'd murdered his wife and her lover in Toronto, and in the photograph the man was being led from the courtroom with a black coat over his head. About the curvy woman in the corner store who had flirted with him when he stopped to buy a treat for his daughter on the way home from work. Maybe he was thinking about fixing himself another whisky and coke.

Or maybe he did notice and just thought all women were like that :furious. Maybe his friends wives were like that too. Maybe that was what the men talked about the lunch room at the paper mill while eating the sandwiches their wives had slapped together the night before. Maybe that was what they laughed about while carefully smoothing and refolding the sheets of wax paper and the little brown bags, returning them to their black lunch pails because if they didn't, there'd be he'll to pay at home.

The daughter picked at the foam rubber backing on the yellow plastic placemat and studied the plate plopped in front of her. It was plaid, of all things, brown and white plaid. The daughter was mortified. She thought she would die, just die, if she had to eat one more meal off these plates at this table with these people.