It's a Strange Table. It's Mine.

The first time everyone was at the table at once, I counted.

Not on purpose. It's a thing my brain does when a room gets full — it takes inventory. Lucas was at one end, where he sits. Doug and Sherry on the far side, Doug already reaching across Joe for the rolls like he's twelve and not twenty-two and married. Cathy next to Joe, leaning into him a little, the way she does. Joey across from me building a fort out of his green beans. Gracie at the corner, where she'd installed herself and one baby doll, who was, I was informed, "not hungry but has to sit here anyway."

Twenty-two. Twenty. Ten. Nine.

That's the spread. I had a grown married man and a fourth-grader passing the same dish of mashed potatoes, and somewhere in the middle of it Gracie was explaining to the doll why screen time was off the table tonight, and nobody found any of this strange except me, sitting there doing arithmetic with my fork.

Doug got married last fall. Sherry's good for him — easy, warm, laughs at the right things, doesn't try too hard with the little kids, which is exactly the right move because Gracie can smell trying-too-hard from across a parking lot. Cathy and Joe got married before that. Joe is quiet. He talks when he has something to say and not before, and I've decided I like that about him, even though it took me a year to stop filling his silences out of nervous habit.

These are Lucas's kids. I came in when Doug was twelve and Cathy was ten, which is to say I came in too late to be Mom and had the good sense not to audition for the part. So I'm Emily. I've always been Emily. They hug me at the door, they text me things, Sherry asked me last month how I get the burned cheese off the bottom of a casserole dish, and I felt absurdly honored that she'd asked me and not her own mother and then felt complicated about why that was.

I don't think about the math most of the time. You don't, when it's just your life. It's only when they're all in one room — when the table has to get the extra leaf put in and we're hunting down the folding chairs from the garage — that it lands.

I was pregnant with Gracie not that long ago. It does not feel like a decade. I remember the heartburn. I remember Lucas assembling the crib at eleven at night and swearing softly at a particleboard panel. And Doug was in high school then. He was driving. He has a wife now who knows how I clean a casserole dish.

Joey knocked his green-bean fort over reaching for more rolls, looked at it, shrugged, and started rebuilding. Doug said something to him about structural integrity, and Joey took the criticism seriously, which is the most Joey thing in the world — he'll ignore me telling him to chew with his mouth closed for the nine-hundredth time, but a twenty-two-year-old he sees a handful of times a year says "your foundation's weak" and suddenly it's a consultation.

That's the part I didn't expect, going in. Doug and Cathy aren't really like older siblings to Joey and Gracie. There's too much road between them. They're more like — visiting weather. Cool older relatives who blow in, are interesting, are warm, and blow back out to their own lives. Joey thinks Doug is the coolest person who has ever lived and sees him often enough to keep the legend alive and not often enough to discover he leaves wet towels on the floor like everyone else.

Gracie, for her part, regards all four adults at the far end of the table with the cool neutrality of a small foreign dignitary. She is not impressed by marriage. She has a doll to feed and opinions to issue and very little time for the affairs of giants.

Sherry asked if she could hold the serving spoon for the corn and Gracie said, "You can serve yourself, you have arms," and the whole far end of the table cracked up, and Gracie did not understand why, and I caught Lucas's eye for half a second and we did the thing we do — the small look that means did you hear that, file it away, we'll laugh about it later when it's quiet.

It got quiet eventually. They always leave around the same time, the older kids, off to their actual evenings. Doug hugged me at the door. Sherry said the casserole thing worked, by the way — soak it overnight, she was right to ask someone who burns things regularly.

And then it was just the four of us again, and the leaf came back out of the table, and the folding chairs went back to the garage, and Gracie's doll got carried off to wherever dolls sleep, and the house got small again the way it does.

I didn't have a thought about it, exactly. No lesson. I just stood in the kitchen for a second after, holding the corn spoon, doing the math one more time.

Twenty-two. Twenty. Ten. Nine.

It's a strange table. It's mine.