The dining table is easily large enough to seat a few dozen people. It's cream and pale whites and there is china and silver at every place setting, along with the best white linens from Spain. Large bouquets of flowers sit in three spaces along the table's length, lilies and orchids, despite the fact that it's winter.
A meal is elegantly served at one end; breakfast, family style along the center of the table, and a server stands there in black and white, ready to ladle and spoon at command. The chairs are far enough apart that conversation clearly isn't intended. This is about wealth and appearances, not about family and talking.
There are no plates at the three chairs in front of the trenchers of food. There are cups of discarded orange juice and coffee, small pastry dishes with half eaten croissants, but the larger plates are conspicuously absent. The serving table against the wall is also missing its white linen covering, and its legs look obscenely bare in this setting of carefully crafted perfection.
The dining room has large windows that span from ceiling to floor on one end, and from there you hear the sound of laughter.
The missing linen is spread out on the tile floor, and around it a family is gathered. The little girl is no older than four, and she sits on her father's lap, jam smeared all over her mouth and fingers. The woman sits across from them, and the little girl looks just like her - or she will when she grows up - from the red of her hair, to her freckles, to the blue of her eyes and the mischievous tips of her smile.
"How do you like your picnic, princess?" the woman asks, a hint of an accent speaking to an education in a place with plantations and debutantes, buttering a piece of bread and handing it to her husband, hand lingering in his with promises that the little girl doesn't yet understand.
"It's lovely," the little girl replies with a regal nod of her chin, all grown up despite a childish lisp not yet completely eradicated.
The sun streams through the window, and the coffee on the table grows cold, but that doesn't matter to any of them.