Part One: The Phone Call on the Freeway
My parents said, “Don’t come to Thanksgiving. Your daughter is embarrassing. Your sister needs a drama‑free day.”
My six‑year‑old and I were already on our way to the airport.
If I ever tell this story out loud, I always remember the exact second my stomach dropped. My hands were on the steering wheel of my little sedan, headed down an American interstate toward the airport the day before Thanksgiving. Gray November sky.
Traffic crawling just fast enough to trick you into believing you might actually be on time—classic U.S. holiday travel, the kind of thing they complain about on the morning shows. Ivy, my daughter, was in the back in her booster seat, kicking her sneakers against the seat like she had springs in her shoes.
She’d been counting down to this trip the way kids do, like it was a holiday and a birthday and a unicorn sighting all rolled into one. “Do you think Mason will play with me this time?” she asked. Mason is my sister Allison’s son.
Seven years old and he usually treats Ivy like a mildly interesting app he can close whenever he gets bored. “I’m sure he will,” I said, in that voice mothers use when we’re lying for peace. “And Paige is going to show me her new Barbie,” Ivy continued, undeterred.
Paige is Allison’s daughter. She’s nine and already practicing the kind of facial expressions you see on people who review restaurants for a living. Ivy hummed to herself and hugged the little stuffed fox she’d insisted on bringing “so he can have Thanksgiving too.” She’d made place cards at school—actual folded pieces of paper with our names on them and drawings of turkeys that looked like they’d survived a small explosion in an arts‑and‑crafts room.
She was excited to see her grandparents. She kept saying “Grandma’s house” like it was a magical location with enchanted snacks and bottomless cartoons, some idealized Midwestern home you’d see in a commercial on network TV. I was hopeful.
Not in a naïve way—more in a “maybe this year everyone will behave like adults for four hours” way. A cautious, fragile optimism, like balancing a glass ornament on a moving bus. My phone rang.
The screen lit up with “Mom.”
I smiled automatically, because apparently my nervous system hadn’t gotten the memo that I was allowed to be wary. “Hey,” I said, tapping the button and putting it on speaker, because I was driving on a U.S. freeway and I’m not trying to get pulled over for holding my phone like a teenager making TikToks.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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