The Matriarch Protocol

The lifts are down. The town has exhaled. This is the week the protocol exists for, the one with nothing left to compete for her attention.

Call the matriarch. Book the brunch, the long one, the table by the window that takes a name and a reason. Stay through dessert even when the table next to you turns over twice. Bring the dogs if the dogs are welcome, and they usually are, because she raised you to be the kind of person whose dogs are welcome.

There are four days until Sunday. That is enough time to do it correctly and not enough to talk yourself out of it. The mountain will keep. She is the one record that does not reissue.