Part One: The Holiday That Looked Like the Others
Thanksgiving at my parents’ house on Clearwater Drive had a reliable choreography that I had been part of for thirty-four years.
My mother would start cooking at seven in the morning, which meant the house smelled of sage and butter by the time anyone arrived. My father would position himself in the armchair by the television, nominally watching football, actually sleeping through it in the particular way of men who had earned the right, in their own estimation, to sleep through things. My sister Dana would arrive with Ryan and usually a bottle of wine she hadn’t paid for but would accept credit for, and the afternoon would proceed through its familiar stations: appetizers on the coffee table, the prolonged negotiation about what time to eat, dinner itself, then the long satisfied collapse that followed.
I had made this drive every year.
I had brought Leo every year since he was born.
This year, he was eight years old and going through the phase where everything was either so cool or so boring with nothing in between, and Thanksgiving at Grandma’s house was, apparently, kind of okay, which I chose to interpret as endorsement. He’d been excited about the pie, specifically. We had discussed the pie at some length on the drive over.
“Is it the good kind with the lattice?” he asked.
“Grandma always does the lattice.”
“Because the lattice kind is better.”
“You’re not wrong.”
He had his headphones around his neck and his sneakers lit up when he walked because he had negotiated for the light-up sneakers with the focused determination he brought to things he wanted, which was a quality I loved about him even when it was directed at me. He’d run ahead up the driveway and knocked on the door before I had the groceries out of the car.
That was the last normal moment of the day.
