25. Sloane #2
“It’s just my brother and me, mostly,” I say, which is true, and which gives her nothing, and which I deliver with a small easy smile so it lands like a complete answer instead of a closed door. “He’s deployed. Germany. So holidays are usually pretty quiet for me.”
And Annika — who is so kind, who has no way of knowing what she’s walking toward — sets down her knife and looks at me with her whole warm face and says, “Then you’ll come here. Every year. As long as you want. There will always be a place set.”
She says it like it’s nothing. Like a place at a table is a thing you can simply offer a person, casually, over green beans, the way you’d offer them more wine.
And I have to look very hard at the beans for a second, because something in my chest has gone tight and hot, because there will always be a place set is the single most generous sentence anyone has said to me in years and I have no idea what to do with it.
“Thank you,” I manage, and it comes out almost right.
She squeezes my shoulder and goes back to her river of talk, and I trim the beans with my face arranged into warmth, and underneath it the nine-year-old does what she always does with a gift this size, which is wonder what it’s going to cost, and brace.
That’s the thing about the Sorensens I can’t survive.
It isn’t the money. I could armor up against money.
It’s that they hand you belonging like it’s free.
Like it doesn’t have to be earned or repaid or watched for the moment it gets revoked.
Like a place at the table is just yours, forever, because they’ve decided.
They have no idea — none of them, not Annika with her green beans, not Erik with his shrine, not the twins planning my next visit — that the most frightening thing you can offer a person who grew up the way I grew up is something for nothing.
The table is everything I imagined it would be.
It’s just the six of us — Beau and me, Annika and Erik, Liv and Britta — at one end of a table built for far more, and somehow the smallness of it is worse than a crowd would have been.
A crowd I could have disappeared into. This I can’t.
There’s a turkey Annika brined for two days and sides in dishes that have clearly been in the family longer than I’ve been alive and the good plates, which have no chips, because every plate in this house is a good plate.
I’m seated beside Beau, across from the twins, and the conversation is easy and overlapping and warm in the way of people who’ve been having Thanksgiving together their whole lives, and they fold me into it so completely — Liv demanding my hot takes on her teachers, Erik topping up everyone’s water and asking after the drive, Annika refilling my plate before I’ve noticed it’s empty — that I perform belonging so well I almost convince myself, for whole minutes at a time, that I’m not performing.
It’s Annika who asks, somewhere between the turkey and the pie, in the warm unhurried way she asks everything.
“So tell me, Sloane, Beau says you’re in the theater program.
A BFA?” She says BFA like she’s done her homework on it, which she probably has.
“What is it you want to do, after? Or is that a terrible question to ask a junior. My mother asked me that question at every meal for four years and I wanted to throw the gravy at her.”
“It’s not a terrible question,” I say, and I feel Beau go still beside me, not tense — attentive.
Waiting. Because he knows the answer, and he knows what it costs me to say it out loud, and he’s letting me say it myself instead of saying it for me.
“I want to act. Professionally. Stage, mostly — that’s where my heart is, though nobody’s going to turn down screen work that pays rent.
” The dry thing, automatic, the armor. “I’m auditioning for Yale’s MFA in February.
The showcase is part of it. There’s a slot, and an observer coming, and if it goes the way I need it to go, that’s the next three years. ”
I brace, the way I always brace after I say it, for the flicker.
There’s always a flicker. The polite recalibration, the oh, how fun, the gentle dimming of interest the second someone realizes you mean it, that you’re not doing theater as a charming detour before something serious, that the unserious thing is the serious thing.
I’ve gotten that flicker from professors.
From Evan. From people who were supposed to love me.
It doesn’t come.
“Yale,” Erik says, and sets down his fork, and looks at me with the same focus he probably brought to a faceoff. “That’s the hard one, isn’t it? The conservatory track. They take — what, sixteen a year?”
“Sixteen actors. Across the country. Across everyone who applies anywhere in the world, actually.” I’m surprised he knows that. I’m surprised he cared enough to know that.
“So it’s the draft,” he says. “Essentially. You’re trying to go first round in a field that takes sixteen.
” He nods slowly, something like respect moving across his big weathered face.
“I know that game. I lived it. People think the talent’s the hard part.
The talent’s the table stakes. The hard part is the wanting it that much and getting up every day inside the not-knowing. ”
And I don’t — I genuinely don’t have a flawless line for that, twice in one day this man has knocked the lines out of me, because he’s just described my entire life in the language of his entire life and landed it dead center.
“Dad gets like this about anyone with a dream,” Liv informs me, fond, rolling her eyes. “He cried at my piano recital. I was eleven. I played ‘Heart and Soul.’”
“It was a moving rendition,” Erik says, unbothered.
“Sloane, will you do a monologue?” Britta, leaning in, sixteen and shining. “After dinner? Beau says you’re incredible, he’s seen you rehearse, he says you made him cry at a play and Beau doesn’t cry at anything—”
“Okay,” Beau says, “that was supposed to be private—”
“You cried at a play?” Liv rounds on him, delighted.
“It was a good play,” Beau says, with tremendous dignity, and his hand finds my knee under the table and squeezes, and when I glance at him he’s not embarrassed at all, he’s looking at me with this open uncomplicated pride, like the fact of me, the fact of what I want to be, is a thing he gets to be proud of.
“She’s going to be famous,” he tells his family, simply, like it’s a fact already entered into the record.
“Like, actually. You’re all going to be very annoying about having met her first.”
“We’re already annoying about it,” Annika says, beaming. “Sloane. Whatever you need, whenever the showcase is — we’ll come. We are a family that shows up to things. You’ll get very tired of us in the front row.”
We’ll come. As if a place in my front row is theirs to claim.
As if they’ve simply decided to belong to the thing I want the way they’ve decided to belong to me, casually, over pie, a whole family pledging to drive however far to watch a girl they met this morning chase a thing that probably won’t even happen.
I say thank you. I say it’s a long shot, the Yale thing, I don’t want anyone holding their breath. I deflect it into something smaller and more survivable, the way I deflect everything.
But Beau’s hand stays on my knee, warm and certain, and he leans over while the twins are arguing about the play and says, low, just for me, “Don’t do that. Don’t make it small. You’re allowed to want it out loud in this house. Nobody here is going to take it away from you.”
And that — nobody here is going to take it away from you — is so precisely the thing I have never once believed about anything I’ve ever wanted that I have to look at my plate with no chip in it and breathe for a second before I can answer.
And it’s lovely. That’s the cruelest part.
It’s genuinely, achingly lovely — the ease of it, the love, the five of them who like each other so plainly, the way Beau’s hand finds my knee under the table, the way the twins keep trying to catch my eye to make me laugh, the way Annika beams across the table at her son with the girl he brought home.
It’s the Thanksgiving I never had, the load-bearing day done right, and I am inside it, and it is not mine, and the two facts sit in me through every course and don’t resolve.
Nobody is unkind. Nobody so much as looks at me sideways. They fold me in, all of them, completely.
And I have never in my life felt the distance between where I come from and where I’m sitting more precisely than I do at that warm, loud, perfect table, because there’s no cruelty to push against, nothing to brace toward, just the bottomless certainty of people who’ve never had to wonder, and me, performing certainty I don’t have, in a borrowed black dress, eating off a plate with no chip, filing all of it away.
I excuse myself before dessert. I’m fine, I tell Annika, just need a moment, the drive, you know?
She squeezes my hand. I find the powder room — there’s a powder room, of course there is — and I stand at the sink and grip the edge of it and breathe, the way I breathed on the hallway floor after Evan, and I do not cry, because I don’t, because I never, and I get my face back, and I go back to the table and I am luminous for the rest of the night.
Nobody can tell.
That’s the whole tragedy of me. Nobody can ever tell.
He comes to find me that night, in the guest room, after the house has gone quiet.
I’m at the window — there’s a window seat, the kind in books — looking out at the dark shapes of Annika’s gardens, and he slips in and closes the door and crosses the room and stands behind me and puts his arms around me, his chin on my hair, and for a second neither of us says anything.