A part of her liked the idea of a monster waiting to burst into Coral Gables, waiting to devour Carmen’s cousins and old aunts, their adult children, her fifteen guests. She couldn’t shake her fear at the strange confluence of blood and loud breathing, but she was too nervous about Thanksgiving dinner to give her imaginative leaps much real estate, to spend time or energy on anything but dinner. She forced herself to think of harmless explanations—Who hasn’t cut themselves on some sharp object or another and unknowingly left a trail of blood? Who is to say a cat can’t sound like a lion under the right conditions? Jeanette was fresh out of treatment, only two months living out of the facility. It had been her third stay. Carmen wanted everything perfect, though she had little hope for Jeanette’s continuing sobriety.

At home, Carmen chilled a second bottle of seltzer. She set out more chips, two appetizer stations at opposite sides of the living room. In an hour, her first guests would arrive. She had decided to invite Jeanette for their first Thanksgiving together in years, so many years.

Before this, she had banned Jeanette. Carmen had told her point-blank: she would no longer support her, she would no longer invite her to any family functions, she would no longer be her mother until Jeanette could prove that she was really, truly sober. Such a decision would likely have seemed, to any mother on the outside, cruel. But no mother on the outside could possibly know what it was to face a truth like the one she’d been presented with: that it was her own love killing her daughter, that she needed to become stone, marble, not a mother at all, to save her daughter. Now Carmen would see her daughter for the first time since driving her to detox and then rehab, again.

Jeanette arrived last, long after the steady stream of relatives, one after the other, carrying aluminum trays covered in foil and bottles of fruit juice, as if no one knew what to bring in place of wine. She had told her guests not to bring alcohol but she hadn’t said why. She hadn’t said recovery or drugs or even my daughter. She knew they knew why. That was her family, unwilling to name the truth as it danced like dander in the periphery.

Jeanette greeted Carmen as if the two had just seen each other: airy kiss on the cheek and airy chitchat—how hot is it out there?—between handfuls of chips. The noise in the house had grown to a level that would drown out any wild growls.

“By the way, Mom,” Jeanette said, smoothing an errant curl behind her ear and leaving a trail of crumbs beneath her, “Mario is coming but he couldn’t get ready in time. I gave him the address.”