My First Love

Chapter 18: Thanksgiving

The week before Thanksgiving the campus began emptying.

Not all at once — gradually, like air leaving a room through a slow leak. Fewer people in the dining halls, quieter corridors, the quad losing its usual density of foot traffic day by day until by Wednesday it felt like a different place entirely. A held-breath version of itself.

Most people went home.

---

Prisca was going to Portland.

She told me Sunday, matter-of-factly, in the way she delivered most information — clean and direct, no wrapping around it.

"Wednesday morning flight. Back Sunday evening."

"How long since you've been home?"

"Summer." She paused. "It'll be good. My mother has opinions about how I'm eating and I find it easier to receive those opinions in person than over the phone."

I smiled. "Does she have accurate opinions?"

"She has persistent opinions," Prisca said. "Accuracy is secondary."

---

I was not going home.

Chicago was not far — a two-hour flight, manageable — but my parents were spending Thanksgiving at my aunt's house in Cincinnati this year, a decision that had involved considerable family negotiation and which I had removed myself from by declaring early that I would stay in Boston.

This was partially true.

The fuller truth was that the Cincinnati gathering would involve my parents being in the same room for four days with all their accumulated history, and I had learned to recognize the specific kind of tired that produced in me.

Boston was quieter.

---

Peter was going home to Philadelphia. He told me Tuesday with the mixed expression of someone who genuinely loved his family and also found them exhausting in equal measure.

"My mother will ask about Sophie within forty minutes of my arrival," he said.

"Have you told her about Sophie?"

"No."

"Then how—"

"She always knows," he said, with the gravity of someone describing a natural phenomenon. "She knew about Ashley before I did. She called me freshman year and said 'Peter there's someone' and I said 'Mom I don't know what you're talking about' and three days later I met Ashley." He shook his head. "It's a gift and a curse."

Abdullahi was going to his family in New Jersey — a drive, he said, which he preferred to flying. He packed with characteristic efficiency and left Tuesday afternoon.

---

Prisca came over Tuesday evening.

Her bag was already packed for the morning flight. She arrived with food — containers from a place on Newbury Street she liked — and we ate on the floor with the map on the coffee table between us.

She looked at the marks while we ate.

Nineteen of them now, scattered across the city in no particular pattern except the pattern of a life being lived attentively.

"You'll add more while I'm gone," she said.

"Probably not. I'll mostly be here."

She looked up. "What will you do?"

"Read. Work on the response paper Ellis assigned. Walk, maybe." I paused. "I'm fine with quiet weeks."

She looked at me with the specific kind of attention she gave things she was genuinely thinking about.

"You mean that," she said. Not surprised — just confirming.

"I grew up making peace with my own company," I said. "It stuck."

She was quiet for a moment.

"I'll text," she said. "If that's all right."

"It's more than all right."

---

She left early Wednesday morning.

I walked her to the Uber — unnecessary, she was perfectly capable of managing an airport alone, but she did not tell me not to and I wanted to.

At the car she turned.

She kissed me properly this time — not the cheek, not brief. Warm and deliberate and unhurried, her hand at my jaw, mine at her back.

When she stepped back her expression was open in the way it got sometimes, the composed surface set aside.

"I'll be back Sunday," she said.

"I know."

She got in.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched the car until it turned the corner.

---

Thanksgiving Day was quiet in the specific way of a city that has sent most of itself home.

Peter had left me the remaining bagels from Forsyth Street before he went, which was thoughtful. I made coffee and ate and read by the window while Boston moved slowly through its holiday morning outside.

My mother called at eleven.

"You're sure you're all right?" she said, for the third time.

"I'm sure."

"You're alone on Thanksgiving."

"I'm alone and fine on Thanksgiving."

"Daniel—"

"Mom." I kept my voice gentle. "I'm genuinely fine. I have food and work and a good book. I'll call you after dinner."

A pause. "Are you seeing anyone?"

I smiled at the window. "Yes."

Silence. Then, with the particular brightness of a mother recalibrating: "Since when?"

"A few weeks."

"What's her name?"

"Prisca."

"That's a beautiful name."

"I know."

---

I called her that evening.

She picked up on the third ring — the background noise of a family gathering audible behind her voice. Her mother asking something. A younger voice that had to be Caleb.

"Hold on," she said, and I heard her move to somewhere quieter.

"Happy Thanksgiving," I said.

"Happy Thanksgiving." Her voice was warmer than usual — the Portland version, slightly less composed, more open. Home had done something to her edges.

"How is it?"

"Good. Loud." A smile in her voice. "Caleb grew again. He's taller than my father now and very pleased about it."

"And your mother's opinions about your eating?"

"Delivered within the first hour." A pause. "She also asked if I was seeing anyone."

I waited.

"I said yes," she said.

"What did she say?"

"She said *good.* And then she asked if you eat properly." A brief laugh — warm and genuine. "I told her I'd find out."

"Tell her yes," I said. "Mostly."

---

We talked for forty minutes.

Not about anything significant — the family stories, the food, the particular geography of being home after months away. She described the way Portland smelled after rain and it was exactly as she had said — pine and wet concrete, specific and irreplaceable.

I told her about the quiet day and the map and the mark I had added while she was gone.

"Where?" she said.

"The sidewalk outside my building. Where I watched the car turn the corner this morning."

A pause.

"Daniel," she said softly.

"I know."

---

Sunday evening her text arrived at seven-fifteen.

*Landed. Back in Boston. The city smells like ambition and clam chowder.*

I laughed at my phone.

*Welcome back.*

*Thank you for the calls this week.*

*Thank you for making them worth making.*

A pause. Then:

*I'll come over tomorrow if that's all right.*

*It's more than all right,* I wrote back.

The same words as before.

She sent back a single word.

*Good.*

---

I added the sidewalk mark to the map properly that evening — a small clean pencil point, the twentieth now.

Twenty moments. Twenty truths.

Outside Boston resumed its full noise after the holiday quiet, the city filling back up with itself, returning from wherever it had been.

I sat at my desk and worked and felt, underneath the ordinary evening, the particular warmth of someone on their way back.