When he returns from the kitchen, the fog has shifted. Light is filtering in through the high plate-glass windows of the dining room, bright but watered down like ink or wine, and as jelly-fragile as the splatters of yesterday's rain. It blots the blood from colors but leaves no shadows and sharpens his vision impossibly. It makes him imagine that he can see both women at the table as they are, and the sudden honesty -- disconcerts him.
"Do you take milk? Sugar?" he says to the interloper, and sets the tray down at her elbow. The sound of embossed silver hitting the glass of the tabletop makes them both wince.
"Just a slice of lemon, please," she replies, smiling at him and leaning her head towards his at a confidential angle: intimate, although she is his wife's sister, not his, and she is about to argue in a soft, sweet voice with his sister, not him.
He blinks, and pours the tea.
It steadies him to fill each china cup to a certain level and not past, with a precision that belies the tight ache in his wrists. Milk but no sugar for his wife, that he could conjure in his sleep. It blossoms up from the bottom, turning the black liquid a shade as pale and warm as dirty wool. She takes it without waiting for him to pass it to her. Both hands. She does not bother with the delicately curved handle, or wince when the heat bleeds through porcelain to her dry cracking palms. Still, the corner of her mouth deepens with irritation while he peels a slice of lemon off the small dish and hooks it over the rim of his sister-in-law's. When she in her turn does not move, regarding the cup with pleasure as distant as a stranger looking through a cafe window at the menu, he presents it to her, saucer and all, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his back when he leans in his seat to place it before her, to keep the old anger out of his spine.
"Thank you," she says.
Only then does he pull his own towards him and add five sugar cubes and what his wife calls a heretical layer of cream, his stiff fingers deliberate, practiced, if not quite as practiced as they are at preparing according to his wife's taste. (He never drank tea till he married her). They look away, lovely heads turning subtly on long necks, and sip mincing, tight-lipped sips. Their movements rhyme, closely if not exactly matched, and the two are more sisterly in their faint disapproval of his choice in condiments than he has ever seen them be for family or love.
A moment of parallel shadows over tea. It has a kind of broken beauty, but it vanishes like a rainbow off an oilspill when the one sits forward, golden curls spilling over her full cheeks, too saccharine to match her bitter choice of beverage, and the other stops listening before her sister has so much as opened her fat-lipped, wet pink mouth. He can see everything, all right, in this treacherous 4:00 light.
He breathes in steam and closes his eyes.
Your description of the sisters delighted me, especially the sister-in-law. How subtle the story was, without true plot or theme was sort of refreshing and relaxing.
