Every night, at 5 o'clock, our dining table trembles and tosses boldly between the bodies of us three. The patio behind us is calm and content as we sit together and dine. The atmosphere atop our dining table is warm and comforting like fresh baked cookies with some sneaky extra chocolate chips.

 Teasing words are transferred from mother to daughter, husband to wife, daughter to father. All of school and work’s worries are washed away over our dining table. We three exchange stories from our days, but it always ends with words of pale yellow. Not too loud, not too boring. 

As we share, my mother’s smile is small, her laugh tame as a circus tiger. She covers her petite smile with a hand, a habit she inherited from her father. But occasionally, if the pale yellow words have a bit of a comical magenta, although her hand remains a wall, her laugh booms and bounces between my father and I. It’s contagious. 

My father’s smile is one of unrestraint, his mustache reaching up to embrace the bottom of his nose. His cheeks rise up beneath his tired, worn glasses he’s yet to replace. His laugh is like a sneeze of a father; loud and extremely exaggerated. It’s contagious. 

His laugh runs across the table to where I sit, tagging me for my turn. My lips are scared. They don’t reach up, they rather seem to arch down a tad. Then my lips stretch across my face into a thin, happy line. Next comes my laugh, a loud, strong as Thor ‘h’ sound starts my laugh and winds it up like a jack in the box. Jack pops up from his box and my laugh sprints from my vocal cords and out to our dining table, dancing right in the middle of it, to join the chuckles of my mother and father.

 Our laughs join ghostly hands and dance in a circle with ghostly feet. Our smiles look at one another, a father’s and a daughter’s, a husband’s and a wife’s, a daughter’s and a mother’s.