On my text thread with Theo, three dots appear and then disappear.
After two more starts and stops, all I get is a frowny face emoji.
I wait to see if the dots appear again, but they don’t.
I’m about to text Theo and ask what he’s up to today, but my phone dies. Oh well, Theo doesn’t need me bumming him out. He’s in Napa with his boarding school friends, probably halfway into a case of cabernet even though it’s only 9:00 a.m. there.
* * *
? ? ?
My mother and I have different definitions of a small dinner. This becomes clear when she asks me to put the leaf in the dining room table, which seats ten without it. A steady stream of aunts, cousins, and neighbors arrive throughout the afternoon. We sip sweet tea and mill around the formal living room we only use when company visits. I stay glued to Amanda’s side so I don’t have to explain my ten-year absence or sudden reappearance.
But I needn’t have worried. Everyone is in their church clothes and on their best behavior. They were raised right; they won’t say anything to my face, but I know I’ll be the topic of gossip on everyone’s ride home. The closest thing my absence gets to an acknowledgment is an “I’ve been praying on you,” from my great-aunt Eunice.
By the time Aunt Carolyn calls everyone to the table at 2:55, the house is packed and the table is groaning under the weight of a dozen serving dishes, including three kinds of potato salad, every auntie convinced theirs is the best.
“Kids’ table is in the kitchen,” Aunt Carolyn scolds a child in a miniature Lacoste polo shirt when she catches him sidling up to a chair at the dining room table. I don’t recognize him. He must be a cousin born during my exile.
I follow Amanda to the kitchen table. We’ll be the oldest, but at least I’ll be spared the adult table. We can filch extra wine from the pantry and gossip about the boys she has crushes on at school. There are always plenty of those.
“Not you.” Aunt Carolyn holds her arm out like a militant crossing guard to block me from the kitchen. “You graduated college, you graduated to the adults’ table!” She makes it sound like a reward, not a punishment.
“But I want to sit with Amanda,” I protest.
“Nope.” Her tone leaves no room for negotiation.
I end up seated between Aunt Ruthie, my mom’s older sister, and my second cousin Travis, who I gather is Polo Shirt Kid’s father. As a teenager, I assumed Aunt Ruthie was a lesbian, but had the good sense not to make a big production of it. She worked as a park ranger at Tallulah Gorge State Park and went on yearly trips to other national parks with an all-women’s tour group. But maybe I was wrong and she just didn’t want to be tied down by marriage like her younger sister. After all, Aunt Ruthie never lost her place at our family’s holiday table, although maybe that’s putting too much stock in the infallibility of my father’s gaydar.
Dinner passes without incident. My mother is quick to interfere when Uncle Robert asks whether I have a girlfriend back in the city. “Did you know Finn got a new job at Netflix? We’re so proud of him,” she interrupts. A collective ooooh goes up from the table. I’m not sure whether to feel happy that I’m finally worthy of my mother’s pride, or disgusted that she’s still doing everything she can to hide my sexuality.
“Do you think you can get them to bring back Bloodline for another season?” Uncle Robert asks, taking the bait.
Aunt Ruthie and I are the only people availing ourselves of the wine. “It’s good you made time for us,” she tells me in a tipsy whisper after her third glass of Chardonnay, and the “us” sounds more like “ush.” “I’ve heard all about how busy you are back in the city, but you’ve been away too long. Your mama missed you.”
I choke back a bitter laugh at the implication that my absence was by choice.
* * *
? ? ?
?Later, after the relatives have cleared out and the dishes have been scrubbed by hand—“The dishwasher doesn’t get them clean enough,” my mother argued—the three of us are installed in the den in front of the TV.
“Let’s watch Schitt’s Creek,” Amanda suggests. “I think you’d like it, Mom, it’s about a family.”
“I don’t want to watch anything with profanity in the title,” she counters.
Amanda and I exchange a look, but neither of us argues. It feels too difficult to explain, so we settle on a Hallmark movie about an uptight city bitch who goes skiing with her best friend only to find their chalet double-booked with a pair of eligible bachelors. It doesn’t matter that the movie is halfway over; the guide description makes it obvious where this is heading.
I have one eye on the TV and the other on my phone where I navigate to Theo’s Instagram profile to see if he’s posted from California, but there are no updates. My deep dive into the cast of boarding school friends he’s traveling with is interrupted when my phone lights up with a call from Hannah.
“I’m gonna take this.” I rocket off the couch, glad for any excuse to be saved from this movie and trot up to my bedroom.
“Thank god!” Hannah says when I answer. On her end cars whiz by in the background and she pants lightly, like she’s power walking. This doesn’t sound like Connecticut.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Everything.”
“Could you narrow it down a bit?”
“David and I had a fight.” She pauses like I’ll know what it was about without her having to tell me, and at a different point in our friendship I might have. But right now, I have no clue. About kids? Does he want her to move to Connecticut? I wrack my brain trying to think about anything Hannah’s said recently about their relationship, but come up blank.
“About Christmas,” she adds.
“What about Christmas?” I ask.
“He doesn’t get it. On the way home from Thanksgiving, we had this fight and he was all, ‘How do you expect us to move forward if you won’t spend Christmas with my family?’？” I’ll give it to her, she does a spot-on imitation of David, dropping her voice and adopting his clipped, precise way of speaking.
“You’ve been together almost two years. It’s not completely unreasonable for him to want you to spend Christmas together.”
“Finn! You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I’m always on your side,” I tell her, “but I’m saying that I can also see why he’s upset.”
“It’s stupid that he’s upset,” she rants. “He’s Jewish! Christmas isn’t even his thing.”
“Sure, and when was the last time you went to church?” I’m positive it was for the baccalaureate Mass that was part of graduation weekend, and only because it was mandatory. There’s silence on her end and I can picture her trying to come up with a gotcha she can throw back at me.
“Seriously, Han, if you want to spend Christmas with David’s family, I understand.”
“That’s not why I’m calling. I don’t want to be let off the hook, I want you to be outraged, too. He doesn’t understand that you guys ARE my family. He called our tradition little. How insulting is that? But what really grinds my gears is that we wouldn’t even be having this fight if I wanted to spend Christmas with Brooke, and it’s not my fault she’s a complete narcissist.”