She talked about Andrew with ease. Not the managed ease of someone being careful about what they say, but the ease of someone who has stopped hiding something and is still adjusting to the new lightness of it.
“He thinks he might come down for Thanksgiving,” she said. “With me, I mean. If that’s okay.”
I set down my coffee cup.
“I would really like that,” I said.
“His parents might come too, actually. We talked about it. Kind of a larger thing.”
This was new territory. Not just Andrew meeting the version of me that existed in Hartfield, but the Lawsons at my table, the strange assembled family that this year had made out of something that had been entirely separate.
“I can do Thanksgiving,” I said. “I’ve been doing Thanksgiving alone since your father died, which is fine but this would be better.”
Paige’s face did the thing again. The thing where she absorbs information about what my life actually looks like. Alone on Thanksgiving. Not dramatically alone, not pitiably — I had Donna and her family’s standing invitation — but alone in the specific way of not having your own family at your own table.
“Mom,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I said. “Bring Andrew. Bring whoever wants to come. I’ll make your father’s stuffing recipe.”
She cried a little. I let her.
Then we paid the check and walked out into the October afternoon and I showed her the town she had grown up in, the way you show a place to someone who is seeing it for the first time, even if they have seen it a hundred times before.