“That must be fun. No wonder you like the holiday—it must be a huge party. How big is your table?”

“Big,” he says. “And my Aunt Mercedes practically has to drive an eighteen-wheeler to shop for Thanksgiving.”

“I can’t even picture it,” I say. Although I’ve always wanted to be part of a big family. My mom didn’t marry Dalton until I was twelve. So for years it was just the two of us, living in various run-down apartments around the greater Burlington area.

My mother had been Dalton’s receptionist. He married her about eighteen months after his first wife left him. They were married for six years. So now he’s on wife number three.

I moved out about ten minutes after his recent wedding.

Dalton isn’t a monster. But I am not his child, and neither of us ever did a good job of pretending differently. He owed me literally nothing after my mother died. She had no assets to speak of. She cut back her working hours after she married him, because he wanted her to have time to take care of his home, and to cook and to entertain.

My mother loved this arrangement. She learned to play tennis. She went out to lunch with friends.

What she didn’t do was buy a life insurance policy. Or put any savings in my name. And since my mother entered her marriage with no assets, save for a beat-up car and a nice collection of 90s music on CD, there was nothing for me to inherit.

I get a lot of financial aid from the university because my mother passed away. But Dalton pays a few thousand dollars every year toward my books and fees. He didn’t want to pay for me to rent an apartment, though. “Seems silly when you could live in your old room,” he’d said.

That was a generous offer, but it didn’t feel like a real option for me. So I work a lot of hours at the Biscuit, and I’m going to graduate a year early.

“What was Thanksgiving like?” Weston asks me. “Before? With your mom?”

“Oh!” I say stupidly. But it’s been so long since I thought about this. “When I was a little girl, it was just the two of us. We’d get up and watch the Macy’s parade from start to finish. And then mom got KFC chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn. She made the pumpkin pie, though. From scratch. My mother was an impractical person. Back then, she didn’t cook all that often, but she would bake the most exquisite things. I didn’t mind. And I really loved the ritual of Thanksgiving.”

“I bet,” he says. “The ritual is half the fun. Maybe more than half.”

We both go quiet for a few minutes after that. I’m picturing one of our small apartments, with its ugly green carpet and the sagging sofa. The truth is that I would give anything to go back there one more time. My whole childhood, I never had any cause to doubt my mother’s love. Even when she married Dalton, I still knew I was her number one.