Whether Whitney would ever be willing, I genuinely didn’t know.
That was hers to decide, not mine.
Chapter 16 — A Seat at the Table
Months later, in November, the family gathered for Thanksgiving.
It was nothing like the wedding, and that was the entire point.
It was at my Aunt Diane’s house, which is small and a little cluttered and smells of the same three pies every year.
There was no orchestra.
There were no crystal chandeliers.
There was a folding table pushed up against the good table to make enough room, and mismatched chairs borrowed from three different houses, and homemade food carried in by everyone who came, and the particular loud, overlapping, unglamorous conversation of a family that has stopped performing for one another.
There were no VIP tables.
There was no premium section.
Nobody was charged for a seat, or for parking, or for the champagne, which was just prosecco somebody had brought in a plastic bag.
Nobody was handed a lesser plate.
Every person who walked through the door was handed the same thing — a real welcome, and a place to sit, and the assumption that they belonged there simply because they’d come.
Whitney wasn’t there.
She’d been invited — Aunt Diane made a point of it — but she wasn’t ready, or we weren’t, and either way her absence didn’t feel like a punishment.
It felt like a fact, the kind of fact that might change someday if enough small honest things happened first.
I sat at that crowded, mismatched table, wedged between an uncle and a cousin’s toddler who kept trying to feed me pieces of roll, and I looked around at all of it, and I understood something I think I’d been trying to learn my whole life.