He pulls me into his chest and I let myself sag against him, resting my head on his shoulder. I inhale the smell of his deodorant and the sandalwood and leather scent of his cologne. That’s all it takes for something in my chest to loosen. It feels like I can breathe for the first time all day. I might not have preschool recs to trade with Jen and Zoe or opinions on cryptocurrency or football, but I realize I’m glad to be here, too. Because this is where David is, and these are the people he loves most. And I want them to love me, too.
* * *
? ? ?
?The dinner table is magazine spread worthy. After retiring as the local middle school’s vice principal, June spent last summer taking an eight-week course at the Culinary Institute of America outside Poughkeepsie, and today is her recital. She flits around the table filling glasses and cutting turkey into bite-sized pieces for the grandchildren.
“So, David,” Jen says once everyone is settled, “when are you going to put a ring on Hannah’s finger?” She takes a sip of her wine to hide her self-satisfied smile as the side conversations grind to a halt so the rest of the family can hear his answer to the question they’re all wondering, but only Jen is bold enough to ask.
“Well . . . ,” David sputters as he glances around the table for someone to save him.
Nate claps him on the back. “C’mon, Jen, maybe he’s waiting to do it at Christmas and now you’ve ruined the surprise.”
“Mom is knitting Hannah her own stocking,” Adam says with a knowing tone.
It’s clear his older brothers are eager for David to join their ranks as husbands and fathers. It would be cute; except I suddenly feel like I’m in the midst of one of those dreams when you’re called to the front of the class to give a speech you didn’t prepare for, and, oh yeah, you’re not wearing pants either, as everyone at the table looks back and forth between me and David. I briefly wonder if it would look suspicious if I excused myself for the bathroom and let the Becker clan sort this out among themselves.
“Leave him alone,” David’s father says in the tone he uses to quiet a classroom of rowdy high schoolers.
“You know I was teasing you, Davey,” Jen says as she tops off her wineglass. “I’m just trying to help Hannah out! I’m sure she’s getting impatient. I know I would be.” She flashes me a wink like we’re on the same team.
Jen reminds me of my own sister. Tanned, toned Jennifer with the perfect blond highlights was a corporate lawyer when she married Adam. Now she stays home with her two kids and brings the same competitive spirit to being the perfect wife and mother, as if she’s on some elusive partner track at the firm of Mrs., Mom, and Homemaker.
For a while, it looked like Brooke was heading down a less conventional path. After the stock market crashed in 2008, and Lehman Brothers along with it, Brooke took her half of the money from the sale of our childhood home on some quarter-life Rumspringa, globetrotting and partying, probably relieved to be free of the responsibility of “taking care of me.”
She returned a year later with Spencer, a fellow backpacker she met at a Full Moon Party in Phuket. I rolled my eyes when she insisted I come down from Boston the Thanksgiving of my junior year to meet him. I came, begrudgingly, when she pulled out the big guns: “You’re the only family I have.”
We ate turkey sandwiches from the deli downstairs from Brooke’s Upper East Side apartment while Spencer lectured us on the superiority of Japanese sushi relative to its American counterpart and how I must get myself to Angkor Wat before it’s ruined by tourism, like he was somehow exempt from tourist status.
There’s no way he would stick, I thought after my trip.
But he did.
Spencer got a job at Citadel, and Brooke at Credit Suisse. They traded up for nicer and nicer apartments as their combined salaries ballooned. After two years together, they announced they were pregnant the same year I moved to the city. In quick succession, Brooke quit her job, they moved to a house in Highland Park—the town over from where we grew up—and Spencer put a diamond the size of a skating rink on Brooke’s finger.
The next Thanksgiving, there were five of us: me, Finn, Brooke, Spencer, and baby Ella, who screamed her head off the entire dinner until she was a disconcerting shade of purple. After dinner, Brooke and I washed the dishes while Spencer and Finn strapped the baby into the car to drive her in circles around the neighborhood, the only thing that would make her stop crying.
It was the first time Brooke and I had been alone in years—there was always the buffer of Spencer, Finn, or the baby, sometimes all three—and I took the opportunity to ask something I’d always wondered. “Do you ever get sad thinking about Mom and Dad?” She never talked about them, but living in the town next door, she must drive past reminders of our childhood on a near daily basis. I imagined it would be like living in a museum of your own grief.
She heaved out a sigh as she swirled a bottle brush in one of Ella’s dirty bottles. I couldn’t tell if the sigh was due to the general exhaustion of being a new mom or exasperation with me. “You know what your problem is,” Brooke answered, finally. “You need to stop living in the past.”
“Jeez, I was just asking.”
“I mean, sure, I get sad when I think about the fact that Ella will never meet her grandparents, or when I drive past Mom’s old office—it’s a Subway now, by the way. And god, I’d love Mom’s advice on how to get Ella to sleep through the night, or just to hear some reassurance that parenting gets easier, or a hug or a homemade meal when I’ve gone a week without getting more than two hours of sleep at a clip . . .” Brooke trails off, seemingly lost in thought. “But you can’t change the past, so what good does it do to dwell on it? It’s not healthy, Hannah. In order to keep living, you need to move on.”
In the intervening seven years, Brooke popped out two more baby girls and put even more distance between us, moving on with her own life so completely that I’m not sure I have a place in it anymore. When David invited me to Thanksgiving, I felt a mixture of victory and defeat as I declined Brooke’s invitation. Here was proof I was moving on, too, just like she suggested, but doing so meant admitting that Brooke and I would never be close the way I hoped we would be.
* * *
? ? ?
?After dinner, dessert, and three heated rounds of Pictionary, David and I are back in the car, the trunk loaded with Tupperware containers of leftovers. As David pulls onto I-95, he reaches over and puts a hand on my thigh. “My parents really love you, you know.” He lets out a contented sigh.
“They’re great,” I say. “Jen, I could live without, but those gorgonzola mashed potatoes your mom cooked almost made up for her. Oh my god.” I moan in ecstasy thinking about them.
“I’m sorry about Jen. You know that’s just how she is. I said something to her about it after dinner. It wasn’t fair of her to ambush you like that.” He glances over at me, and I can tell he’s nervous, his bottom lip caught between his teeth. “But, about what she said . . . would that be so crazy? If we got engaged, I mean.”
I feel my throat tighten. “Not crazy, no. Just soon. Don’t you think?” I only just checked off the milestone of spending a holiday with his family, and we’re already hurtling toward the next one.