4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Reading the Weather
An evening dinner in Adelaide, seen through two pairs of eyes that are watching the same cracks form from opposite sides of the table. A mother reads the emotional weather of her family the way she always has — in untouched toasties, in the pink rising at the tips of a teenager's ears, in the silence that falls after a careless remark lands too hard. Her eldest son still at home reads the same room like tracking wildlife — subtle shifts, small tells, the instinct to intervene battling the knowledge that his timing is never quite right. The dinner holds together. Barely. And what follows it is lonelier for both of them.
The same family dinner unfolds through a mother's careful vigilance and a son's instinctive observation, both reading the tensions beneath the surface from different vantage points. Greta presides over a meal she has prepared as an act of quiet devotion — the prayer, the amber lamplight chosen instead of the harsh overhead, the table set with care — while Jerome arrives from an afternoon of study and steps into the rhythm of the evening with the easy familiarity of someone who knows exactly which chair is his. The teasing of Charles over his phone and Chloe plays out identically in both perspectives, but the weight it carries differs: Greta sees a mother's warning signs in her youngest son's withdrawal; Jerome sees the gap left by an older brother now in Utah and wonders whether his jokes are connection or just noise. When Charles's remark about peace stills the room, the fracture registers differently for each — Greta absorbs it into the worry she's been carrying since Claire's phone call; Jerome files it away alongside the rawness he glimpsed beneath his brother's irritation, wishing he had Eli's gift for reaching him. The dinner disperses — Jerome to basketball, Charles to his room, Noah to the car — and Greta is left alone in a house that has suddenly emptied, standing in the dining room with a cooling bowl in her hands and the quiet pulling her downward into the fears she has spent the whole evening holding at bay.
