Second Helpings

Ruth set two places for Sunday dinner, just as she had done every week for 41 years.

Tom had died in March. She knew this. She had chosen the coffin, sat through the hymns, and thrown a handful of dirt that sounded like rain on the lid. None of these things had broken the habit of her hands. Two plates were taken down from the cupboard. Two sets of cutlery were taken out of the drawer, his with the bone handles he had inherited from his mother and refused to put in the dishwasher.

She served his portion the way he liked it. Extra parsnips, no sprouts, gravy poured over everything until the Yorkshire pudding went soft. Then she ate her own in silence and scraped his into the bin.

Her daughter rang on Tuesdays and asked if she was eating. Ruth said yes, plenty, which was true in its way.

On the last Sunday of September she came back from fetching the custard and his plate was half empty.

She stood in the doorway with the jug in her hand. The roast potatoes were gone. One parsnip had a bite out of it, a clean crescent with the marks of teeth. His knife lay across the plate at an angle, the way he always left it when he was coming back for more.

Ruth sat down slowly. The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere in the house a floorboard settled.

"Tom," she said, feeling foolish.

Nothing answered. Then the parsnip moved, very slightly, as if someone had nudged the plate with a thumb.

She didn't tell her daughter. She didn't tell the vicar, who had been so kind at the funeral, or the women from the bowls club who brought round shepherd's pies in foil. She told nobody, because she knew exactly how it would sound, and because some part of her was afraid that saying it aloud would make it stop.

The next Sunday she cooked a full dinner and left the room on purpose. She sat in the hall with her hands folded in her lap and listened.

Cutlery scraped on china. A chair creaked. There was the small wet sound of a man eating gravy, and then, unmistakably, the soft grunt Tom made when something was better than he'd expected.

She cried then, sitting on the stairs, with her knuckles pressed against her mouth so he wouldn't hear.

After that she cooked every night. Shepherd's pie, liver and onions, the corned beef hash he'd eaten in his twenties when they had no money and she'd burnt it every time. The plates came back clean. Sometimes she found the radio retuned to his football station. Once, his reading glasses had moved from the drawer where she'd put them to the arm of his chair.

By the middle of October she could feel him in the room when she walked in. The air was warmer on his side of the table. She started talking to him over dinner, the way she always had, about the neighbors and the bins and the price of butter.

He never answered. She didn't need him to.

Her daughter noticed first.

"Mum, you've lost so much weight," she said, standing in the kitchen with her coat still on. "Are you eating?"

"Every night."

"Then why do you look like that?"

Ruth looked in the hall mirror after she left and saw what her daughter had seen. Her cheeks had hollowed. There was a gray tinge to her skin, and her hands, when she held them up, had a slight tremor that hadn't been there in summer. She'd put it down to grief. She had been sleeping eleven, twelve hours a night and waking more tired than when she lay down.

That Sunday she set his place and sat down opposite it instead of leaving the room.

The plate began to empty as she watched. A forkful of mashed potato lifted from the china and vanished. The gravy level dropped. And Ruth felt it, a slow cold pull, like water draining from a bath, somewhere under her breastbone.

She put her own fork down.

"It's me, isn't it," she said. "You're not eating the dinner, love. You're eating me."

The cutlery stopped.

For a long time nothing in the kitchen moved. Then his knife and fork were laid side by side on the plate, the way he only ever placed them when he'd finished and couldn't manage another mouthful.

He stopped coming after that.

The plates stayed full. The radio stayed on her station. The air on his side of the table cooled to ordinary October cold, and Ruth ate her dinners alone and felt the color slowly come back into her face, and hated every mouthful.

She understood what he'd done. Tom had always been the one to leave a party first, the one who said "come on, let's not outstay our welcome," while she was still finishing her drink. He had seen what he was costing her before she had, and he'd got up from the table.

Her daughter rang on Tuesday and said she sounded better. Ruth said she was.

On the thirty-first she went to the cemetery with a flask of tea and sat by his headstone until the light went. The woman two graves along was putting a pumpkin lantern down for someone. Ruth watched the candle flicker inside it and remembered her grandmother saying, when she was small, that this was the one night of the year the doors between the living and the dead didn't quite shut.

She went home and cooked a roast.

Extra parsnips. No sprouts. Gravy over everything until the Yorkshire pudding went soft. She laid two places and sat down across from his, and she waited.

At ten past nine, the chair on the other side of the table creaked.

"Just tonight," Ruth said. "That's the rule. Once a year, and you go home when you're full."

The air grew warm. A forkful of roast potato rose from the plate. Ruth felt the faint cold tug under her ribs and let it come, because one night's tiredness was a price she could pay forty times over.

They had dinner together. She told him about the neighbors and the bins and the price of butter, which had gone up again. When his plate was clean, his knife and fork came to rest side by side.

Then, for the first time, something touched the back of her hand. Light as the brush of a coat sleeve, and gone.

Ruth washed both plates and dried his bone-handled knife by hand, the way his mother would have wanted. She put it back in the drawer, ready for next year.