The smell of grilled turkey burgers wafted in from the kitchen, alerting the guests that dinner was finally prepared. They rose from their seats – a pair on the new Ikea leather couch, another sitting on the Ottoman – adjusted their clothes, and ambled towards the dining room, saying things like, “Do you need any help, Karen?” or “It smells wonderful, honey,” in raised tones.

When they arrived at the table, they found themselves one chair short. Grace, a black-haired hen of a woman, invited her husband and brother to take their seats while she scoured her daughter’s new apartment for a chair to sit in. Her search proved fruitless, and she finally turned to Ralph, her son-in-law, to point her in the right direction.

“Do you have any extra chairs?” she asked, her body half-in the kitchen. Ralph was a large man, bald, with kind eyes, and not imposing in any way. As she waited for him to answer, Grace noted that he had a very peculiar way of handling a ladle when he distributed hot soup into luxurious glass bowls. He paused to consider the question, then set the utensil down, and took two meaningful strides out the door, leaving Grace alone in the kitchen, with the hum of the microwave and a scary drawing of a dog posted to the fridge.

Grace contemplated a strange picture on her daughter’s fridge, in which the her and Ralph were dressed as some sort of demon people in what looked like a rowdy convention hall. An embossed emblem at the bottom read BlizzCon ’08.

“Did he find anything?” Grace’s husband asked when he spotted her through the kitchen doorway. She shook her head, still invested in her daughter’s mythical obsessions, and said, “He went to look.” Her daughter silently set out silverware by her father’s plate, her too-long hair brushing against the cheap tablecloth.

From the other side of the apartment, the sound of a door rebounding off a spring, followed by a swallowed grunt, and then something shifting and scraping through a tight space. Grace grew more embarrassed the more she heard Ralph struggle, and was about to call out, “I can stand!” when he and the furniture arrived in the doorway, both covered in sweat and what looked like fragments of Doritos.

“This should work, right?” Ralph asked.

Grace had seen her son-in-laws chair on her search earlier, but hadn’t for one minute considered bringing it to the dining room. To bring something so personal and, let’s be honest here, disgusting, to a place where people would actually have to look at it, and interact with it, and smell it, wasn’t a thought that had crossed her mind. It wasn’t a thought that would cross a rational, polite person’s mind.

She parted her lips and creased her mouth into something of a smile. She thought about the long nights Ralph spent in that chair – something she’d never witnessed, but had heard about firsthand from her daughter. She imagined him shirtless, maybe pantless, with beer cans and cigarette butts crushed around him, his mouth agape and smeared in fried chicken, the clanks and clacks of medieval warfare assaulting his ears, his back vibrating and his intestines releasing gas at random intervals, as he shouted racial epithets at a blinking television screen.

In her mind, he swiveled only to greet her daughter, and that all he had to say was, Yes, I am coming to bed, and No, I don’t know when. Go on without me.

Grace didn’t have a chance to reject her son-in-law’s offer, as her daughter entered at that very moment. She looked nothing short of bemused at the sight of the gigantic, J-shaped plastic and leather beast in her husband’s hands and, after giving her mother a sideways glance that said, I’m not as ashamed as you wish I was, offered to sit in the seat herself.

Grace made faint protests, but they were inaudible in the scuffle that followed, as Ralph and the rest of the family worked together to squeeze the gamer chair through the too-narrow dining room doorway, everyone too caught up in the spirit of the task to meditate on the arrival of such a disgusting artifact.