Done with the cramped front seat of a subcompact car. Done with the whisper-thin wine glasses that shattered if you looked at them wrong. Done with the kind of entertainment that required squeezing past strangers’ knees to reach a middle seat in a dark theater.
After the story ended, after the applause faded and the guests trickled home with leftovers wrapped in wax paper, Sophia stood alone in her enormous living room. The candles had burned down to pools of wax. The last jazz record crackled on the turntable. Outside, through those garage-door windows, the city slept.
Sophia had discovered that most social gatherings were designed for people who wanted to shrink. Cocktail parties with no place to sit. Dinner parties where the portions were architectural rather than satisfying. Concerts where you stood on concrete for three hours because “general admission” was somehow considered a perk.
He moved out three months later. She threw a party to celebrate.
Sophia smiled into her bourbon.
Sophia Masterson was fifty-two years old, and she was done with small things.