I had not been involved in working out the repayment terms. That was between my parents and Adam, and it was their arrangement to make. What I had done was establish, in the family meeting, that the arrangement existed — that the money was a loan and not a gift, that Adam understood it as a loan, that there were real terms attached. Before the family meeting, I hadn’t been sure whether any of that had been made explicit, and making it explicit had been one of the things the meeting accomplished.
Even if Adam never paid a cent back, that was between him and my parents, and it was not my crisis to absorb. What I needed to know was that they had a plan that was real and not a fantasy, and that they were living in a place they could sustain, and that neither of those things was contingent on me.
For now, those things were true.
## The Thanksgiving Question
The first major family gathering after the move was Thanksgiving, which fell about six weeks after my parents settled into the apartment. The question of where to have it had never been formally raised, but I could feel it hanging — could feel the historical gravity of it pulling toward my parents’ house, which no longer existed as my parents’ house.
For twenty-eight years, Thanksgiving had been at their house. The same table, the same chairs dragged in from the garage, the same small arguments about the stuffing (my mother prefers it cooked separately; my father has always been a traditionalist about cooking it inside the bird, a position he holds with more intensity than seems warranted). This was the first year in twenty-eight that those things were not going to happen in that house.