seven seconds

[After a woman asks about Ben's father at a party, and he reveals his father died many years ago] "Everyone looked at the floor for the obligatory seven seconds before someone changed the subject, a ritual deeply familiar to people whose parents die young. Ben waited for the obligatory seven seconds to pass. It had been years since he had felt embarrassed during those seconds. By now they felt to him like time spent waiting for an elevator: boring, wasteful, a chance to run errands in one's head."
(from The World to Come, by Dara Horn)