So apparently buying the family house also meant inheriting Thanksgiving dinner. I guess John and I should have read between the lines before we signed the purchase and sales agreement.

No surprise, my family took it upon themselves to make sure I knew. Three of my five siblings just happened to show up one day without warning, or even knocking, to take their old seats around the scarred pine trestle table in the kitchen. If there was a gene for boundaries, it had definitely skipped at least this generation of the Hurlihy family.

“But we can’t have Thanksgiving here,” I tried. “We’re under construction.” I meant that literally, since my sister Christine’s contractor husband Joe and his crew were knee deep in renovating our new-old house. But I meant it figuratively, too, as in John and I were trying to construct a life together, a sub-family of our own.

Not an easy task amidst the insanity of living with my father, who had come with the house, and who had a tendency to hog most of the available air in any given room. Polly, my pregnant and single assistant teacher, had moved in, too, after being traumatized when a recent nor’easter rolled through her waterfront winter rental on the other side of Marshbury. Oh, and we’d rescued a mama feral cat and her four kittens, who were still working things out with John’s dog Horatio.

Hosting Thanksgiving on top of all that seemed like something that should happen, say, a week from never.

“We have to have dinner here,” my sister Christine said. “It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving otherwise.”

Even though I knew it probably wasn’t going to fly, I flashed my most pitiful look. “But I’ve never cooked a turkey in my entire life. I’ve never even touched one.”

“Sure, you’ve never touched a turkey,” my sister Carol said. “Would you like a list?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Ex-husbands don’t count.”

Carol put her hands on her hips. “Yeah, they do.”

“We might want to think this through,” my brother Michael said, “considering Sarah’s idea of cooking is preheating the oven and wandering away.” He grinned our mother’s crooked smile, which always made me miss her all over again, even though she’d been gone for more years than I wanted to count.

“All my girls are good cooks, thank the good Lord.” Our dad made his entrance across the speckled linoleum floor as if it were an off-off Broadway stage. He raked a wayward clump of white hair from his watery brown eyes, leaned over and patted my hand with one of his beefy paws. “I’ll be busy setting up my man cavern by turkey day, God willin’. But if you need any help that won’t take more than a minute or two, feel free to give me a holler, Christine.”