Lit eZine Vol 10 | p-18 | FICTION | The Dinner Party

SHORT STORY

THE DINNER PARTY
by Fiorella Ruas & Jonathan Pet

The bedroom was dark, lifeless, sterile. Grace sat at her old dressing table, dabbing concealer under her eyes. Pointless, really. Some things couldn’t be covered up. The table itself was slightly battered; the varnish worn thin in places, the edges chipped from years of use. Tucked into the corner of the mirror was an old photo. She glanced at it. A younger Grace and Chris stood outside a train station; backpacks slung over their shoulders, expectant, excited. The start of an adventure. She barely recognised herself.

She looked back at her reflection. Paused, mildly horrified. Then she slapped her cheeks lightly, as if trying to wake something up. Whatever it was, it didn’t respond. She crossed the room to the full-length mirror. The woman staring back wasn’t the one in the photograph.  She breathed in. Held it. Then sighed and braved her way downstairs.

In the kitchen, she pulled a bouquet of sunflowers from her shopping basket. Flowers she had bought for herself, with the rest of the shopping, for her own birthday party. The label on the plastic wrapper read special offer in bold red print. The bright yellow petals were already starting to curl at the edges. Seemed fitting. She stripped away the plastic and jammed the flowers into a vase. The stems were too long. She couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.

From the living room, voices. Laughter, glasses clinking. The empty sounds of a family pretending everything was fine.
She picked up the vase and carried it to the hallway. Then she stopped. She closed her eyes, her grip tightening around the glass. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring herself to take part in her own party. She just froze, standing in the dim hallway, gripping the vase, listening.

Through the door, voices blurred together with the clink of glasses. Chris’s voice, his words a little too slow, a little too loose. Drunk again. Emily’s distracted murmurs, punctuated by the occasional bored sigh. Bill, filling the silence with his attempts at charm, forced positivity, the way he always did when things felt off. And then—her. That smooth, calculated tone, too polished to be natural. Frances. “Where the hell is she?”

Grace tightened her grip on the vase. Even when asking a simple question, her mother-in-law managed to lace it with judgment. It was a gift, really. A pause. Then Chris, noncommittal, careless. A shrug she could hear in his silence. Bill’s voice, cheerful and oblivious. “I don’t get it. Are we here to celebrate your wedding anniversary or Gracie’s birthday?”
Grace could almost hear Emily’s smirk. “Both,” her daughter said cynically. “Knowing your wildly successful business partner, he probably thought it’d save him a bit of cash. Two for the price of one.” A beat. Then, directed at Chris: “You did at least get her some flowers, didn’t you?”

A longer pause. The kind of silence that meant guilt.
Grace stared at the door, at the chipped paint near the handle, at the way the light from the living room stretched across the floor but didn’t quite reach her. She didn’t need to see his face to know the exact expression he was wearing. The slight frown, the way he’d reach for his glass just to have something to do with his hands. The boy with the scruffy hair and wild, unrealistic ideas, the dreamer who made her dream, the one who made her laugh, the man who talked to her about ideas, life, projects, and philosophy. Now he was just… this. A man in a crumpled shirt who barely looked up when she entered a room.

Smile fixed. She set the vase down on the table. “Sunflowers! My favourite.”

Chris blinked at her, confused. She refused to meet his eyes. She’d saved his embarrassment, but she wasn’t going to let him get away that lightly. “It’s so lovely you’re all here,” she continued, trying to sound genuine. “Isn’t this great?”

No one answered.

Bill swooped in, filling the awkward silence with a grand toast. He handed her a glass of champagne and raised his own. “To Chris and Grace’s twenty-five years of happy marriage!”

Glasses lifted. Chris hesitated before clinking his with the others, glancing at Grace, but she still wouldn’t look at him.
Then Frances, because of course she couldn’t resist, smirked over the rim of her wine glass. “And to Grace’s half-century!”

Half a century. It sounded obscene. Grace let out a light laugh. “Oh. Yeah. That too. Thank you, Frances.” Yes, thank you, Frances, for reminding her, for spelling it out to the room, to the world, with such unkind relish.

The room hummed around her—the clinking of glasses, the scrape of cutlery, the rise and fall of voices that somehow never quite included her. The same black-and-white prints on the walls, stuck in the late nineties like some kind of time capsule of bad taste. The people gathered around the table, filling the space with a noise that didn’t quite reach her.
Chris slumped in his chair. His crumpled shirt, his greying beard, the vague, faded outline of someone she used to know. Emily, opposite him, scrolling through her phone, barely engaged. Frances, fake-tanned, holding court like a woman who had made it through life on well-timed put-downs and Tesco Sauvignon Blanc. Charlie at the far end, eyes glued to his game, disconnected. The family she had built, held together, carried for so many years. And yet, sitting there, she felt like a stranger at her own party.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that their home was filled with something unspoken, a quiet disappointment. A collective, unconscious resentment, as if they all blamed her for something they couldn’t quite put their finger on. The room warped slightly, as if she was watching it from the other side of thick glass.

Somewhere, faintly, Emily’s voice cut through. “Mum? Are you alright? Mum?”

Grace startled, as if waking up. She forced a smile. “Better get the cake.”

Frances perked up immediately. “Did you make Charlie his own, darling?”

Grace’s smile stretched. “No, Frances,” she said, too brightly. “It’s already hard enough doing two separate meals, so I thought, in support of Charlie, I’d make us all one big, beautiful, tasty, sugar-, gluten-, and casein-free cake.”

Frances gave a tight-lipped smile. “Mmm… can’t wait.”

Grace turned toward the kitchen before anyone could see her face crack. Rinse the dishes, stack them in the dishwasher, shut the door with her hip. She had done it all—the cooking, the setting, the bleedin’ cake. Even the bloody flowers. The ones she bought herself. The ones already wilting in the vase because she couldn’t be bothered to trim the stems.

Grace turned to the sink. Pans. Of course. Because cooking a full meal for her own birthday just wasn’t quite enough. She turned on the tap. Water splashed up from the pans and sprayed directly in her eye. She instantly wiped it away with the back of her soapy hand—only to make it worse. Suds stung into her eye, blurring her vision. Grimacing, she reached for a tea towel, dabbed at her eye, then paused. It smelled… off. A mix of something vaguely meaty and whatever had spilt throughout the course of the day. She held it away from her face, saw the stains, and immediately chucked it onto the counter with the rest of the day’s regrets.

One eye still half-shut; she made her way to the fridge, bent down, and grabbed the cake. Or tried to. The plate tilted. The cake slid. Splat. She stared at the mess. The final insult. A breath. “Fuck.” Another breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck… oh, fuck it.” She crouched, scooped the remains back onto the plate in a heap that no one would mistake for intentional, and shoved it onto the counter. She could hear Frances in the next room, probably gearing up for some passive-aggressive remark about presentation. Maybe she’d tell them it was deconstructed. Frances liked fancy words for things that were just broken.

Grace leaned against the counter, trying to hold herself together. Her handbag caught her eye. She reached in, pulled out a small pharmacy bag, and took out the familiar bottle of antidepressants inside. Turned it over in her hands, staring at it for a long moment. She hadn’t wanted to take them. Had only taken them because no one—not Chris, not the kids, not even herself—could stand the other version of her. The one who felt everything, all at once, with no polite filter to smooth the edges. But this version wasn’t much better, was it?  This half person. This disappointed ghost of a human being, who at least didn’t shout and scream anymore. Slowly, she put the box back into the bag.

Her eyes drifted to the table. Emily’s tobacco tin. She picked it up and moved to the hallway, wedging herself onto the bottom step of the stairs, shifting the two abandoned bikes aside to make space. She tapped Emily’s tobacco tin, rolling a cigarette with practised ease. It had been years, but apparently, some things never left you—like riding a bike, or, in her case, sitting under one to avoid her own birthday party.

From the dining room, voices drifted through the doorway.

Frances. That unmistakable tone of polite venom. “What the hell is the matter with Grace?”

Grace smirked. Well, where to begin?

Chris, low, hesitant. “Don’t tell her I told you, but she got the sack last week.”

Her grip tightened around the cigarette. Oh, lovely. So that’s how he framed it. As if she’d been caught shoplifting or exposing herself in Tesco, rather than being made redundant by yet another cost-cutting exercise.

Frances sighed dramatically. “Again?”

Grace sighed too, mirroring her mother-in-law’s theatrical sigh.

Then Emily, dry and sharp as ever. “I’m amazed she lasted so long. Let’s face it, she only got that crappy job, like she got all the others, just to pay for the excessive rent on this dump and fund your son’s epic failure in business.”

Grace took a slow drag, listening. Emily wasn’t wrong. But she was brave enough to say it out loud, which was more than Grace could say for herself these days. There was something of her younger self in Emily—something fierce, unfiltered, unwilling to politely let life happen to her. Where had that gone?

Emily wasn’t finished. “Wasn’t the plan that we’d all be living in a big house in the country by now? Sure, that’s how you pitched it to us.”

Grace could almost hear Chris shift in his seat, grabbing for something to do with his hands, the way he did when he was backed into a corner.

Bill, ever the diplomat, cleared his throat. “Hold on a minute. It’s not just your dad’s business.”
Emily scoffed. “There you go, Bill. Says it all.”

Grace snorted quietly. Christ, she loved that girl.

There was a pause, then Bill again, scrambling to change the subject. “Weren’t you meant to be in Ibiza with your girlfriend, Em?”

Frances, swooping in with feigned innocence. “What a shame you didn’t bring her. I’d love to have met her.”

Grace rolled her eyes. Of course, she would have. And then would have proceeded to question her inappropriately over a glass of Tesco’s finest, aiming to make Emily as uncomfortable as possible.

Grace exhaled smoke as Emily replied, “Yes, I know, Grandma. Unfortunately, I had to let her go to Ibiza with her new lover instead.” A beat. “Why do you even bother with a wine glass, Grandma? Just lug it straight out of the bottle.”
Grace let out a small laugh, almost choking on the smoke. That shut Frances up. There was a shuffle from the other room, the weight of an awkward silence.

Then Frances again, pressing on. “Well, at least now Gracie’s out of work, she’ll have more time for her family. Never too late for a bit of damage control.”

Grace flicked ash into the half-dead plant beside her, watching the embers smoulder against the dry leaves. That was it, wasn’t it? She’d spent her whole life cleaning up after other people, fixing things, making sure no one went without—except somewhere along the way, she’d misplaced herself. She stubbed out the cigarette and stood.

Behind her, Bill’s voice trailed off. “Time for Gracie to look after herself a bit.”

She turned back toward the kitchen.  And grabbed the cake. Yes, Bill. Yes, it is. Grace walked back into the dining room, the cake barely holding together on the plate. A tragic, lopsided heap. Fitting, really. She dumped a serving onto Bill’s plate with a wet splat. Bill looked at it. Then at her. Then back at it.

She tilted her head. “Are you trying to say that I’ve let myself go, Bill?”

Bill went pale. His eyes darted around the table, desperate for backup. None came. Even Chris had the sense to stay out of it. He was still processing. Or rather, failing to. He just sat there, one hand loosely gripping his glass, his face blank, as if someone had hit pause on him. “No, Gracie, no—” Bill stammered.

Grace turned before he could dig himself any deeper, grabbing the last bottle of wine from the table. Frances barely had time to register what was happening before Grace was standing over her, bottle poised. “More wine, Frances?”

Frances, for the first time that evening, looked wary. “Oh—well, I—” Frances’s expression barely shifted, but she flicked a look at Chris—a silent command, a crisp do something about this written all over her face.

Chris remained motionless. And she poured. And poured. And poured. Frances, to her credit, didn’t flinch. Just sat there, watching her glass fill past the rim, over the edge, spilling onto the tablecloth. The rest of the table had fallen into stunned silence. Even Emily, who had been watching with detached amusement at first, suddenly tensed. Her phone lowered further into her lap. She glanced at Chris, then back at her mother. “What the fuck,” she murmured under her breath. Charlie’s game beeped faintly in the background; the only sound left in the room.

Grace stepped back, surveying her work. Then she turned to the room, lifting the bottle like a toast. “More wine, anyone?”

Chris blinked, his brain still buffering. Frances pursed her lips, delicately dabbing at the wine pooling near her plate. Emily, sitting rigid now, scanned the table as if trying to gauge just how bad this was.

Grace smiled. “Great. I’ll just pop down the offie and get some, shall I?”

And with that, she turned and walked out the door, leaving them to their perfectly ruined evening.

The Dinner Party is an extract from the novel “Finding Grace”, which will be available soon on Amazon.