My mother called me in October to discuss it. Not to tell me — to discuss it. Progress.
‘We thought we’d do it here,’ she said. ‘In the apartment. It’ll be smaller, but we can manage.’
The apartment dining area could seat six with the leaf in the table they’d brought from the house. Six was exactly the number: my parents, Adam, his girlfriend Maya who had been in the picture for eight months and had made a good impression on everyone, Leah who had been incorporated into our Thanksgiving on a standing basis years ago, and me.
‘We can fit,’ I said.
‘It’ll be tight,’ she said. ‘But it’s fine. It’s our first one here.’
There was something in her voice that I recognized as effort — not the effort of doing something hard, but the effort of finding something genuinely okay in a situation she’d had to adjust to. She was making the new apartment feel like a place to have Thanksgiving, rather than treating it as a lesser version of the place she’d had Thanksgiving before. That was not a small thing.
‘Can I bring the pie?’ I asked.
‘You always bring the pie,’ she said. Like it was obvious. Like it had always been obvious.
I said I’d bring two.
## Maya and the Outside View
Adam’s girlfriend Maya had not been around for the acute phase of the situation — she and Adam had been together for about four months when everything happened, not long enough for her to have a front-row seat but long enough that Adam had apparently told her about it. She works in healthcare administration, which I mention only because it shapes how she thinks about complicated family dynamics: with the particular clinical-but-human combination of someone trained to understand that people in difficult situations often behave in ways that don’t represent their best selves, and to look past the behavior to the situation that produced it.