Jeff left the apartment on the following Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving in Ohio. I was on the sofa in the living room, and before he walked out he histrionically charged into the kitchen and removed all the liquor from the cabinets and, with his arms full of the bottles, he carried them into his bedroom while keeping his body angled in such a way so that I could see. When he came back out he slammed the bedroom door and carefully locked it, jiggling the knob several times so that the unmistakable sound of it reached my ears. I found the gesture quite funny, and he was in such a huff that I knew it had nothing to do whatsoever with his fear of me drinking his booze, but rather with his desire to deprive me of something he felt certain I deemed important. The irony was that I had no desire to drink, and instead planned to post myself on that very sofa and watch football and sappy movies on his flat screen the entire time he’d be gone. But it didn’t end there. Right before he left—actually, he went as far as to walk out the door only to come rushing back in as though he’d forgotten his keys—he swept into the living room and informed me for the third or fourth time that he was going home for the holiday and would return on Saturday. Then he left without waiting for a reply, which was fine with me for I had no intention of giving him one. But it was the way that he’d said “home” that got me, as though the place was reserved for him only and that I had no right of entitlement myself, goading me, going so far as to smirk as the word left his mouth. Aside from a flash of anger that quickly passed, the incident didn’t upset me as it might normally have, and instead got me thinking about my own past and the Thanksgiving that first brought my parents and me to Spencer, Ohio. I wonder now whether I can tell their story exactly as it had happened. I’m not sure, but whether the truth is bored into every last detail is irrelevant; our memories, after all, have their own story to tell, and I stand by mine.

My parents were both born and raised in West Virginia, though they didn’t meet there and instead found each other in a bar outside of Cleveland when my mother had just turned fifteen; her best friend’s father owned the bar and allowed them to drink there once they possessed the desire to. My birth came nine months later.