26. Geo
— ? —
Geo
Thanksgiving at my family’s estate is off the table, which is a sentence I can finally say without my voice doing anything at all.
Mom called last week, careful in the way she gets when she’s trying not to take sides. Dad isn’t ready. The wounds from the anniversary party are still too fresh, Vivian’s name still a live wire in every family conversation. Better, she said, if we did a smaller one this year. Separate.
So we host our own.
The dining room table is set for a fraction of what used to gather at Dad’s estate.
Mom comes alone, early, with a covered dish and red-rimmed eyes she’s calling allergies.
Harrison’s parents fly in from Nashville, his mother already fretting about the flight, his father carrying a bottle of bourbon he swears is older than Harrison.
A few friends who stuck around through the worst of it, the ones who didn’t pick sides or picked ours.
It’s a smaller table than the one I grew up with. It’s also the first one in a year with no one at it pretending.
Harrison finds me in the kitchen before anyone arrives, while the turkey’s resting and I’m pretending the gravy needs more attention than it does. He comes up behind me, hands settling light on my hips, his mouth at the curve of my neck, not taking it anywhere, just there.
“Everyone’s about to descend,” I say, and don’t move away.
“I know. That’s why I’m getting mine in now.” He turns me around by the hips, unhurried, and kisses me once, slow enough that I lose the thread of whatever I was doing to the gravy. “There. Now I can survive both sets of parents.”
“You’re going to make me burn the gravy.” I smile. “And I definitely don’t want another fire.”
“You can burn anything you like. I’ll fix everything for you.” He steals a pinch of stuffing and is gone before I can swat him. I stand there flushed in my own kitchen like a teenager, which is a ridiculous way to feel with a turkey resting six inches away.
“Daddy, the forks go on the other side.”
Val is standing on a chair, supervising Harrison setting the table with the expression of a woman handed subordinates beneath her.
“Are you sure?”
“Mrs. Patterson showed us. The fork goes on the left because left and fork both have four letters.”
Harrison looks at the fork in his hand like it has personally betrayed him. Moves it to the left. “Better?”
“Better.” Val nods, then climbs down to repair the napkins he’s apparently also ruined.
I watch him take flatware notes from a six-year-old, this man who used to fill arenas, and it strikes me that a year ago I couldn’t have pictured him in a kitchen that wasn’t staged for a magazine.
The reprise is finished. It comes out in three weeks, and he keeps not mentioning it around me like the not-mentioning is a gift he can give.
In the kitchen his mother walks me through the cornbread recipe that’s been in their family for four generations, telling stories about Harrison at thirteen, gangly and tone-deaf until suddenly he wasn’t, and I’m laughing before I decide to.
She decided to like me a long time ago and never took it back.
She never once blamed me for leaving her son, even when she probably should have.
Mom finds me alone at the sink later, everyone else migrated toward pie. She picks up a towel without asking and starts drying.
“Thank you,” she says. “For not making me choose.”
“You shouldn’t have to choose.”
“No. But I would have.” She sets a plate in the cabinet. “If he’d pushed. If he’d made ultimatums. I’d have chosen you. Every time.”
“I know.”
“Your father might come around.” She takes another plate from my hands. “But some of what you lost, you lost. It doesn’t come back just because you want it to.”
I nod. I’ve spent the year learning exactly how true that is.
The doorbell rings while I’m drying the last pan.
Nobody’s expecting anyone. My mother-in-law says something about the neighbors. Harrison is already wiping his hands, heading for the door, and I follow, because some animal part of me needs to see who rings a doorbell on Thanksgiving.
He opens it, and every muscle in my body goes still.
Richard Nguyen is standing on the porch.
He looks older than he did at the party. Grayer at the temples. His coat probably cost more than my car and he’s holding it closed at the throat like the cold is a personal insult. Behind me the party keeps going, Val’s laugh, a fork on a plate, and all of it sounds suddenly very far away.
“I’m not staying,” Richard says, before either of us can speak.
Harrison steps back to make room anyway. He doesn’t say a word. He just puts himself half a step behind me, close enough that I can feel him there, and lets this be mine.
“Vivian’s back in treatment,” Richard says. “Arizona this time. Ten days ago.” His voice is scraped down to nothing. “Exhaustion. Depression. Some other things they’re still finding names for. She’s going to be there a while.”
The news lands somewhere under my ribs, in the complicated place I’ve stopped trying to organize. My sister. The woman whose voice is on the recording that ended my marriage. The girl who braided my hair at family reunions and swore the step part was just paperwork.
“Is she okay?” I ask, and I hate how much I mean it.
“No,” Richard says. “But they tell me she will be. Eventually.”
His eyes move to Harrison, and his jaw works.
“I’m not here to make peace with you,” he says. “I looked at my daughter’s life in pieces at that party, and that doesn’t vanish because you wrote a good song. I may never do a holiday with you in the room. I want to be honest about that.”
“I understand,” Harrison says quietly.
“I don’t think you do. But you will.”
Then Richard looks at me. Really looks, the way he used to before all of it, back when I was just his wife’s daughter and he was the man who taught me to parallel park in a church parking lot on a Sunday because my own father never got around to it.
“You were good to her,” he says. “When she didn’t earn it. I wanted you to hear that from me. Not through Linda.”
My throat closes. Behind me, Val’s voice rises, narrating the parade balloons to someone who didn’t ask, gloriously oblivious to the fact that her grandfather is standing in the doorway deciding whether he’s allowed to want her.
“Do you want to come in?” I ask. “There’s more food than the handful of us can survive.”
For a second I think he might. His hand tightens on the doorframe. Somewhere in the house his granddaughter shrieks with laughter, and I watch him hear it, watch what it costs him.
“Not this year,” he says.
But he doesn’t say never. He says this year, and after twelve months of doors slamming, this year sounds like a sliver of light under one that’s been shut a long time.
He turns to go. At the bottom of the steps he stops without turning around.
“Tell Val her grandfather says hello,” he says. “Tell her he’s sorry he’s been so busy.”
Then he’s gone, down the path to the car that costs more than my year, and I stand in the doorway with the whole warm noise of the party at my back and the cold of him in front of me, holding both at once, the way I’m apparently going to have to hold everything now.
Harrison’s hand finds the small of my back.
“You okay?” he asks.
“He said this year,” I say. “Not never.”
“I heard.”
I lean into him, just slightly, just enough. Inside, someone has put music on, and Val is teaching my mother a dance she invented that has no discernible steps, and the oven is still going with nothing in it, and my stepfather is driving away without forgiving a single one of us.
“I’m going to reach out to her,” I say. “When she’s ready. Not for him. Not for Harrison.” I watch the taillights find the corner and disappear. “She’s still my sister. I don’t get to pick that. God knows I’ve tried.”