The Extra Plate

Every Christmas Eve my mother laid one plate too many, for whoever comes, she said, or for nobody, and when I was small I asked her which, and she said it doesn't matter which, it matters that it's one plate.

She did the sums out loud while she cut the bread. Maybe Mr Vondra from upstairs, if his daughter doesn't call. Maybe the man who reads the gas, he's always late that week. Maybe one of your father's cousins, the one who never says he's coming. Maybe nobody, and then the cat gets the fish skin. And somewhere in the middle of all those maybes the knife came down and there was enough, not a plate for Vondra and a plate for the gas man and a plate for the cousin, just one, the way a one-in-six and a one-in-six make a one-in-three before anyone has rolled anything.

I read today about a woman in Oxford who took apart five proofs of where chance comes from and found the same small hinge in all of them: the word or, and the rule that or adds up. Nobody has got it out of anything else yet, she says. Every road so far brings it along. I thought, of course. You don't derive the extra plate. You come into the kitchen already knowing that two halves of a guest are a chair.

What the sums decide is how much bread, and that part she worked out every year, and got right, and showed her work. The or was just the table. Then the doorbell, or the wind in the stairwell, or the phone, and she wiped her hands, and went to see which.