The last supper, p.1
The Last Supper, page 1
Copyright © Wendy J. Fox 2026
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
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in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fox, Wendy J. author
Title: The last supper / Wendy J Fox.
Description: Santa Fe : Santa Fe Writers Project, 2026. | Summary: “From
the author of IF THE ICE HAD HELD and WHAT IF WE WERE
SOMEWHERE ELSE, Wendy J. Fox’s THE LAST SUPPER follows
three months in the chaotic life of a middle-age stay-at-home mother
who is desperate for something more than the world of her suburban
home and lives in terror of what she will make for dinner, until the cracks
in her marriage finally split so wide she sees a path to reclaim her own
creative and economic agency”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025037538 (print) | LCCN 2025037539 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781951631574 trade paperback | ISBN 9781951631581 ebook
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels | Fiction | Domestic fiction
Classification: LCC PS3606.O97 L37 2025 (print) | LCC PS3606.O97 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025037538
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025037539
AUTHOR PHOTO: Bethane Brome
Published by SFWP
369 Montezuma Ave. #350
Santa Fe, NM 87501
www.sfwp.com
To Mama C and Auntie C. I miss you both.
Friday, May 11
Amanda never had a sweet sixteen nor a coming out party, and the only recent adult birthdays she could recall were of soggy office breakroom sheet cakes, or collapsing onto the sofa after her children were in bed. For her last milestone, thirty, before they had kids, her husband Kyle had taken her to his favorite after-work pub, where he’d run into some colleagues and spent most of the time watching baseball on the television mounted behind the bar. When she had married him, she knew he wasn’t one for big gestures. She married him in some part because he didn’t parade her around like a prize he’d won.
She checked her to-do list. Her fortieth, tomorrow, would be different. The decorations were done, champagne chilled. White plates, fluted glasses, and flowers from the wholesale florist in miniature mason jars were spread out on the kitchen counter, alongside a gluten-free cake from an artisan bakery in the fridge, the layers spun in a perfect rose-gold frosting. How it tasted when it was two days old wouldn’t matter. She was not eating gluten-free. Gluten-free was just for the hashtags. Her children’s plastic playset, which usually dominated the yard, was pulled off to the side, out of the angle of the pictures.
She used the selfie mode on her phone’s camera as a mirror and pulled her dirty ponytail tighter. The clock on her phone screen ticked. Forty minutes until her older son, Toby, eight, was due home from school, and she really needed to wake up her younger son, Blake, a three-almost-four-year-old, from his nap. Already, she had decided dinner was going to have to be simple, maybe grilled cheese and canned tomato soup.
That morning, Amanda had looked around her home and felt deflated. There were toys strewn everywhere, discarded and leaking yogurt cups and empty single-serving snack bags on every side table, unsorted mail in a heap by the front door, pizza crusts on the kitchen counter from last night’s excuse for dinner, a pair of pants tossed off by Toby in the middle of the living room floor when he decided suddenly he was not going to wear jeans to school, but instead wanted pajama bottoms. He’d taken off his underwear too, which were wrapped around the inside-out pants she hadn’t yet picked up. It was unclear to her if he’d put on new underwear with the jammie bottoms or not, but she didn’t care. He was already a third grader. She wasn’t going to fight him too hard about his clothes.
She had fought Blake about putting on a pair of pull-ups when he decided to wear jammie bottoms too. She didn’t have time for an accident.
She wanted her party to be a reset. She wanted to be the center of attention, and she wanted to prove she was someone other than a stay-at-home mom in worn yoga pants. All day she’d been perfecting the details of the party, and of an announcement she planned to make: she was going to found a lifestyle brand.
Every time she thought she might lose the battle against the clutter in the house, or when she thought she might not be able to wrestle the playset by herself, she whispered entrepreneur to herself, and she felt a crackle of energy like the caffeine tablets she’d taken in college to get through finals, or the adrenaline spike of narrowly avoiding a fender-bender.
Now, the house was in near-perfect order, the food prepped or finished, and alongside her whispers of entrepreneur, she’d also been praying all day she’d fit into her party dress. It was new. She’d avoided trying it on, which was risky, but she had to be the kind of person who took risks. She had to be the kind of person who would believe things would work out.
Do the dress and then wake up Blake, she thought. Steeling herself for an encounter with her closet, which was overflowing and overstuffed—exactly how she felt most of the time—she reminded herself to take some selfies. The dress was just the first step in her new reveal.
The dress was there, shrouded in cellophane from the cleaners. She’d ordered it online and sent it out to make sure it was perfectly wrinkle-free. It was. Gold, crisp, and pretty. It matched the cake. She’d pair it with a statement belt. It was her regular size, a 16, the average size for an American woman.
Not even Kyle knew yet that her fortieth birthday party was a kind of debut. Martha Stewart started her brand at forty, so why couldn’t Amanda? She loved the color of the dress. The fabric flecked with just the tiniest bit of metallic thread would pick up the tones in the cake frosting and, if she got lucky in the photos, the highlights in her hair.
She stepped into the dress carefully, taking her time. The sleeves were a little snug on her shoulders, but she could live with that; sleeveless didn’t feel like an option, not with the way her arms had started to sag. Turning side to side, she liked how it looked. The dress closed from hip to armpit, which she’d chosen intentionally so she wouldn’t have to ask Kyle, or anyone, for help zipping up in the back. She pulled at the zipper, but it stuck. At first, Amanda thought it was simply snagged and tugged harder. Nothing. She yanked harder still. This time it moved, but she felt her skin nicked by the zipper teeth. The slider was stuck just at the bottom of her bra, where the skin popped out below the band. She blew out all her breath and sucked in her stomach and gave it another jerk, but it didn’t budge. Sucking in at the tummy sometimes worked, but she couldn’t suck in her ribcage.
911! she texted her neighbor, Dani.
Shapewear, Amanda thought. She wriggled out of the dress and found her shapewear and stepped into it. It pinched, but it helped. This time, the zipper closed, barely. She found it hard to breathe, and her breasts were flat against her chest like a pair of ruined cream puffs, rather than making the curvy V she’d hoped for. Fuck. She checked her phone. Dani hadn’t replied. You are such an idiot, Amanda thought. The dress was, yes, her usual size, but still. It had more structure than she expected when she saw it online, and the fabric had less give than what she usually wore. She should have tried it on earlier, instead of trying to build up drama.
She’d planned to hashtag selfies in the floor-length mirror #firstlook and #thisis40.
She got the zipper undone and left the dress wadded on the floor, where it shimmered still but looked like a sea anemone deflated from being touched. Just as she began a desperate hunt through her closet, she heard the front door open. Toby was home. She waited the few beats for him to drop his backpack on the floor and head for the kitchen. He wouldn’t touch the party food, all heavy apps. She’d made the hors d’oeuvres herself, which was important to her, but also was why the last day had felt like such a race against the clock.
Crab on thin toast points, a deconstructed bruschetta in shot glasses instead of on bread, deviled quail eggs, and a charcuterie board with olives, nuts, and cheese on the side. Rosemary crackers. The crackers she’d purchased from the same bakery as the cake.
Kyle called this kind of food “whores devours,” thinking he was funny, but while her husband was a lot of things, he was definitely not funny. She also couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a comment about her weight, which had been a struggle her entire life, but especially after Blake. They had laughed a lot, she supposed, when they were younger, but she’d lost patience for him somewhere along the way. When she’d met Kyle, he had an earnest, goofy charm, but now her sons kept her supplied in puns and bathroom humor.
Suddenly, she realized a healthier option, and a lot less work, for party food would have been simple snacks on greens. Plus, the crab was meant to be accompanied by thin slices of avocado, but she didn’t want the avocado to brown, so it was on the list of things for the morning.
Toby also knew better than to touch the cake, or mess with the flowers, the ends of the stems clipped to keep the blooms fresh. He would be looking for string cheese, which was buried in the vegetable drawer. That gave her another few minutes.
Dani, who likely didn’t own a single elastic band’s worth of shapewear, and who, if confronted with an ill-fitting dress would turn it into an art project, texted back. What’s up gril? Yoiuu okay?
God, her neighbor was such a terrible texter. Just as Amanda was going to reply, she heard Blake’s cry. He was awake and cranky, having slept for far too long.
Never mind. I’m fine, she replied. See you tomorrow. Dani was going to take pictures.
Usually, Amanda had about two hours before Kyle arrived home from work, but on Fridays he was often early, unless he went to happy hour.
Feeling panicked about organizing a food delivery, considering time and cost—Kyle was not going to be happy about what the flowers rang up to, even from the wholesale florist—she put on yoga pants and preheated the oven for frozen pizza. She knew the oven would just be burning off bits of other dinners and wasting electricity and warming up the house, and she knew they’d just had pizza, but she needed to make it simple. She set a timer on her phone, turned on the exhaust fan over the range, and clicked the ceiling fan in the kitchen up a notch. In a glass bowl, she put together a half-hearted salad and rearranged the fridge to find space for it.
“Toby,” she said, “I know you just got home from school, but can you grate some cheese and cut peppers to put on the pizza for me?”
He nodded. He was good like that, plus he liked to use the box grater, for whatever reason. He gnawed on the string cheese.
“Wash your hands,” she said.
Blake was still howling. She pulled him from his crib, which he was too old for, and bounced him, which he was too heavy for, then set him on a stool in the kitchen next to his brother. All Blake wanted was to be near Toby.
“Can you grate the cheese together?” Amanda asked them, feeling rushed, panicking that the kitchen would get dirty again. The swirls of the overhead and the oven fan felt more like endless looping, rather than actually moving the air. Blake and Toby took turns with the cheese grater, but the block of cheddar was too heavy for Blake and it tumbled to the floor. Before she could grab it, he was there, taking a bite out of the side.
“Here,” she said, yanking the refrigerator door open and finding a plastic container of dry parmesan, “Blake, you do this cheese.”
Toby went back to grating, the cheddar rinsed briefly under cold water, and Blake shook the parmesan container like a tambourine.
If she slid the fancied-up frozen pizza—peppers on only one half—into the oven as Kyle walked through the door, dinner would be served in seventeen minutes. It was early for dinner, but that meant it would be sooner to get the boys to bed and Kyle conked out in front of the television, not asking her questions about what she was doing. She could scour the closet for a new outfit then.
Amanda worried that she hadn’t talked to Kyle about the brand concept that was meant to go in tandem with her fortieth. If she were honest, she was worried he’d mock it. Officially middle-aged, two kids to go with it, but if the party tomorrow could be perfect, it was her opportunity to transcend being just Blake and Toby’s mom, just Kyle’s wife. She wanted to launch into a fuller, more creative life, like what Dani had, where she could make some of her own money, which she missed having.
Her idea, her brand, focused on what it meant to be a modern stay-at-home mom. In the past, she’d tried direct marketing, attempting to sell candles, skincare, essential oils, with the idea of having income and flexibility. The closet in the guest room was stuffed with product and samples. Kyle was still angry about the cost and what he called “wasted” time, when she was in fact trying to earn. But there was so much to do every day, and Amanda could see now how multi-level marketing preyed on people like her, moms and others who needed money. She never had enough of a network to make it work, isolated at home.
After her second baby, she hadn’t returned to her salaried job. The Monday her maternity leave ran out and she was supposed to go back to the office, she didn’t. She couldn’t. When she thought about squeezing into tailored pants, which were already stretched at her thighs after Toby, and trying to care about revenue and booking clients at the marketing agency, staying snuggled next to Blake felt better. Not easier, just better. It took HR several weeks to figure it out before she received her last check and a termination notice in the mail. They’d called, but she hadn’t answered. She’d told Kyle her position had been eliminated and she filed for unemployment. Still, she knew she had talent.
When the unemployment actually went through, she was shocked. Getting paid to stay home with her boys was the best job of her life, so far. She told her mother, Camille, she’d gotten a severance. The lying didn’t really bother her. She was allowed to have a few secrets. And that was years ago, but she’d had no regular income since. The direct marketing, the pyramid schemes, as her mother insisted on calling them, yielded nothing but unpaid Visa bills and those boxes of samples crammed into the guest room closet.
This was why founding her own brand was so important. Her mother had told her once to consider instead of getting involved in a pyramid scheme, to put herself at the top of the pyramid.
It was after five, and she put the boys in the bathtub, put the pizza in the freezer to keep it cold. Toby would watch Blake and make sure he washed. At well after six, she texted Kyle.
ETA?
friday night thought i’d go out with some of the guys from work. dont wait up.
Her husband knew her party was tomorrow, but she also knew he couldn’t understand what it meant to her, to plan an event for herself, with adult food and adults on the guest list. She pulled her ponytail tight again. Her hair was thick and never stayed in the elastic.
Okay but I need you to not be completely useless tomorrow, please.
She didn’t have guys from work. She had her two main guys, right in front of her, hungry and both fresh out of the bath.
“Seventeen minutes,” Amanda said, opening the oven door.
Saturday, May 12
Amanda’s friends Sarah and Jess were late to her party, but that was all the better. She’d had a hell of a time trying to get Kyle to put on something that was not a T-shirt, to get the boys cleaned up—how they’d gotten so messy in the dozen hours since their last wash was beyond her—and then to figure out what the hell she was going to wear. She’d meant to pick through her closet after dinner, after the debacle of the dress she’d ordered, but she’d fallen asleep after reading to Toby and Blake, the three of them in Toby’s thin bed, Amanda pressed between them. When she woke in the dead of night, she was angry at her husband for not coaxing her to bed, and then, in a half-sleep and half-awake state, she worried about her outfit in a series of weirdly escalating dreams.
In the morning, groggy, she made coffee and settled on a navy wrap dress, the same one she’d worn to countless weddings and Kyle’s work events and that she hoped would cohere with the aesthetics of the party, which was supposed to be tastefully bright. She didn’t have time for that now, though—it was going to have to be, as the photographer, her neighbor Dani’s problem.
Once Amanda added the statement belt, lacquered with a shiny gold, she felt better. Her gold flats worked too. Navy was maybe a little more robust than she’d wanted, but a neutral all the same. She was still angry at herself about the first dress. She should have known. Her body was not the kind that always fit easily into clothes. Of course she’d dressed professionally for her job at the marketing agency—that was expected—but she’d never been a fashionista. Black pants, white or light-colored shirts, a jacket for client meetings, decent shoes. Standard office wear. Before she’d quit, though, and especially after, she’d struggled to lose the baby weight, and she had turned to personal shopping. Her regular grooming routine had also changed. She’d had her hair colored, lightening her natural brown to what her stylist called “caramel” and getting her nails done. The weight, stubbornly, did not come off. Instead she found herself wearing more and more makeup and growing pickier and pickier about her clothes. Other moms seemed effortlessly fit, but she knew, for most of them, it wasn’t. It was a struggle—like when Kyle had once commented that her friend Jess was rude, Amanda thought Jess didn’t come across as rude at all. She came off as hungry.
