at a table and smoking a cigarette. The round, claw-footed table is the same one at which six years earlier my friend John had looked around and noted that the walls were breathing. Gammie had found the table in the basement of the Wanamaker mansion. “Hey, old man,” I say to him.
“Hey, old man.”
My grandmother’s empty vodka glass sits upon a table. “Mom wants me to put some vodka in Aunt Gertrude’s prune juice,” I observe.
He blows out some smoke. “Why not?” he asks.
“You want me to make the drink for Gammie, too?”
He nods. “You bet.”
My father is wearing plaid pants and a blue oxford-cloth shirt monogrammed with his initials: JRB. Dad still smokes L&M Kings. My mother can’t stand the fact that he smokes. But every time he tries to stop, he turns into an almost unrecognizably angry, short-tempered grouch, and rather than share a house with this irritable stranger, my mother has surrendered to the smoking.
Matt the Mutt sleeps upon the floor at my father’s feet. It is rare to catch him in a moment of repose.
I mix up the drinks. After I nearly fill Aunt Gertrude’s glass with prune juice, I look at it uncertainly. “You really think I should put alcohol in her drink?” My father is staring toward the ceiling, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl and dissipate. For a moment he doesn’t respond. Then he looks at me, eyes shining.
“Do you miss her?” he asks me.
He’s talking about my sister, who got married a year and a half ago, in between her junior and senior years at college, and who’s since moved to Oregon, where she is teaching special-needs kids. In just a few months, Mount St. Helens will explode, leaving an inch of ashes all over her front yard. Cyndy will sweep some of these into an envelope and mail them to me in Connecticut, where by then I’ll be living in a group house with a bunch of hippies in a comedy-group commune. As one does. I will hold the ashes in my hands and think of my sister all the way across the country.
I still have those ashes, still wrapped in a plastic bag inside a tin tea box that Gammie gave me when I was a child. I have a few old letters from Shannon in that box as well. The carnation I wore when I got married. A pregnancy stick with two lines in it. Some old love letters. A photograph of London Donna that I can’t quite bring myself to throw away. Plus, the ashes of a volcano.
“Yeah, a little,” I said.
My father nods. It’s our first Thanksgiving without Cyndy, and everything feels a little weird. I am happy that my sister is in love and that she has found something—teaching—that she seems to enjoy so much, and I love that she is embarking upon a new adventure. But it hurts my feelings that my sister has launched upon a new life without me. The way I figure, I will never launch upon anything. Oregon is undiscovered country as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never been farther west than Ohio. My sister says she’s seen the Pacific Ocean, a thing so vast I cannot possibly imagine it is real.
In the years since then, I have come to understand that this is exactly what happens: you get used to a certain way of being in the world, and then it changes. The people you love move away, or die, or something else happens—sometimes you just fall out of the habit of friendship, and the friend who you once saw almost every day becomes someone you track distantly—through Facebook, or Christmas cards, or not at all. I’ve had children of my own who’ve grown and moved away, and now I understand that feeling those pangs of distance and change is far more normal than any reliable routine. But in November 1979, this was all new territory. Sometimes the passage of time feels terribly personal, as if mortality is something they came up with just to hurt your feelings.
My sister had called us earlier that morning in a panic. She’d taken her turkey out of the refrigerator and found the giblets still frozen inside the cavity. Somehow she’d panicked and concluded that the turkey she’d bought from a farmer’s market had not been properly dressed and that it would fall to her to do the ceremonial disemboweling. My mother had talked her down, finally convincing her that she just had