The Holiday My Family Left Me Off

The sweet potatoes were still hot when I found out my whole family had already had Thanksgiving without me, six days earlier, in a house forty minutes from mine, with a full table and no seat saved for Jettie Galloway.

I want to tell you I saw it coming. I did not. I was standing in my kitchen above the old Purdin feed store, in the apartment I have rented for six years, with the oven mitts still on my hands and a praline topping cooling on the counter like it had somewhere to be. I had roasted those sweet potatoes one at a time, the way my grandmother taught me, foil wrapped tight until the skins blistered and the sugar bubbled up dark at the edges. It is six hours of work for one dish. I have done it every year since I was twenty two. Tradition, I always told myself, was what made a family feel like a family, even when the family in question made that hard to believe.

Purdin is not a big town. Nine hundred people, one stoplight that mostly blinks yellow, a grain elevator you can see from almost anywhere if you know which direction to look. I work at the county clerk’s office, four miles down the highway, filing deeds and marriage licenses and the occasional obituary correction, and I have lived alone above that feed store since my last relationship ended and I decided I would rather have quiet than company that did not fit. I am the one who remembers birthdays. I am the one who drives Mom to her cardiology appointments in Kirksville when nobody else has the time. I have always been the reliable one, the one who shows up, and I never once thought that showing up might be the only reason anyone kept me around at all.