The day she stopped waiting

Chapter 5

Thanksgiving was at the Mercer house that year.

Patricia had done the whole thing the tablecloth and the good china and the centerpiece with little gourds and candles. She had made three kinds of pie. She had organized the seating arrangement with the precision of someone staging a small theater production, which was more or less how every Mercer family gathering worked. Everything looked warm and deliberate from the outside. From the inside it was a different landscape.

Lydia had brought the cranberry sauce. Not from a can she'd made it herself, from scratch, with orange peel and a little ginger, because she remembered that her grandmother used to make it that way and she thought someone might notice. No one did. The cranberry sauce sat in its dish next to the canned kind that Gerald preferred, and Gerald took the canned kind, and nobody mentioned Lydia's.

She sat beside Ethan at the table, which was the best seat in the house as far as she was concerned. Ethan was Gerald's nephew, which made him Lydia's first cousin, and he was one of those people who showed up twice a year at holidays and was better in those two visits than most of the family managed all year. He was thirty-one, worked in civil engineering, lived in Portland, had a dry humor that slipped in under the surface so quietly that sometimes people didn't catch it until three beats later.

He caught the cranberry sauce thing immediately.

"This is good," he said, having tried hers first, because he had seen her bring it in. "This is really good. Did you make this?"

"Yeah."

"With actual oranges?"

"And ginger."

He looked at the canned version. He looked at her. He said nothing more, but he put an extra spoonful on his plate in the particular way of someone making a quiet point.

She loved him a little bit for that.

Across the table, Daniel and Selene were talking. They did this at every family gathering now found each other quickly, like tuning forks that vibrated at the same frequency. She had stopped expecting this to be different. But she still felt it, every time: the small cold press of it, the recognition.

"You know," Ethan said quietly, low enough that only she could hear, "you can tell me to mind my own business."

She looked at him. "About what?"

He glanced, very briefly, in the same direction she'd been looking.

"Oh," she said.

"How long?"

She considered lying. It was her default with family, with coworkers, with herself. She was very good at the quick smooth lie that sanded everything down to a manageable surface.

"Since spring," she said instead.

Ethan nodded slowly. "You talked to him?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She picked up her wine glass. "Because then it becomes real."

"It's already real."

"I know." She stared at the table. "But if I say it out loud and he denies it, I have to decide whether to believe him. And if he doesn't deny it" She stopped.

"You don't know which one is worse," Ethan said.

"I know which one is worse," she said. "I'm just not ready for it to be worse yet."

He didn't say anything patronizing. He didn't say you should talk to him, or you deserve better, or I'm sure it's nothing. He just sat with her for a moment the way you sit with someone in a hospital waiting room, where the only useful thing you can do is be there.

She was grateful for it in a way that made her throat tight.

"The cranberry sauce is really good," he said again.

"Thank you, Ethan."

"I'm going to take more. If you say it's fine, I'll tell everyone you actually made this."

She laughed. A real laugh, small and surprised. "You wouldn't."

"Watch me." He reached for the dish. "Thanksgiving is about gratitude. Someone should be grateful for this."

She let him take more. She let herself sit in that moment for a little while — the one small corner of the table where someone noticed, where something she had made was tasted and appreciated without her having to say a word.

It wasn't enough. But it was something.

She held onto it the whole drive home.