The Prodigal Son Returns (And Immediately Regrets It

I want to be clear that what happened to me last Thanksgiving was not, technically, my fault. I say this because there will be people reading this — and by "people" I mean my mother — who will insist that everything that happened was my fault, up to and including the incident with the gravy boat, which, I would like the record to show, was already cracked *before* I touched it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It started, as so many catastrophic life decisions do, with a phone call.

"You're coming home for Thanksgiving," my mother said. This was not a question. My mother does not ask questions. My mother makes declarations, the way God made light, except with more follow-up calls to confirm you received the declaration.

"Mom, I live in Seattle now," I said. "That's a five-hour flight."

"Your Aunt Rosalie is coming all the way from Boca Raton."

"Aunt Rosalie lives twenty minutes from the airport and gets bumped to first class every time because she once cried at a gate agent for forty-five consecutive minutes."

There was a pause of the specific variety my mother deploys when she wants you to understand that she carried you for nine months and this is how you repay her.

"Fine," I said. "I'll come home."

This is how it always works. I have a master's degree. I have an apartment with a *dishwasher*. I have, at various points in my adult life, successfully negotiated contracts, assembled IKEA furniture with fewer than four mental breakdowns, and parallel parked on the first try in San Francisco. And yet the moment my mother pauses at me over the phone, I fold like a card table at a family reunion. Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what this was.

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The town I grew up in is called Millhaven, Ohio, and if you have not heard of it, that is because Millhaven, Ohio, has done an extraordinary job of producing nothing of note for 140 years. Our claim to fame, as stated on the welcome sign, is that we are the "Home of the World's Largest Fiberglass Walleye," which I always found dispiriting as a child and find even more dispiriting as an adult, because the sign also notes, in smaller lettering, that the title was contested in 2019 by a town in Minnesota. Millhaven has, apparently, committed to fighting this battle. I respect the tenacity. I do not respect the prioritization.

I flew into Cleveland, rented a car that smelled aggressively of someone else's pine-scented ambitions, and drove the 90 minutes to Millhaven while listening to a podcast about a man who had gone feral in the Oregon wilderness for six months. I found this oddly relatable.

The moment I hit the Millhaven city limits, my body began doing things I had not authorized. My shoulders went up. My jaw clenched. I found myself checking my speed because Officer Denkins used to hide his cruiser behind the Dairy Queen on Route 9 and I am thirty-seven years old and I have not lived here since George W. Bush's first term.

Officer Denkins retired in 2014. I looked it up. He is apparently doing very well in Scottsdale. And yet.

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My parents' house has not changed since 1987, which is either charming or a form of psychological warfare, depending on your relationship with the past. The same ceramic rooster sits on the kitchen counter. The same school photos line the hallway, including one of me at age thirteen in which I appear to be attempting to communicate distress to a future generation via my eyes alone. The guest room — *my* old room — still has the wallpaper with the little sailboats on it that I chose when I was eight and have regretted ever since.

My father greeted me at the door by telling me I'd put on weight (I had not) and that my rental car was blocking the Hendersons' driveway (it was not). This is his way of saying he loves me. I have come to understand this the way archaeologists come to understand ancient languages: slowly, with great effort, and mostly after the civilization has already crumbled.

My mother greeted me with a hug and then immediately began feeding me, which is her love language, her primary language, and in fact her only language. Within six minutes of arriving I had eaten a piece of coffee cake, two pieces of coffee cake, and been handed a third piece "just to try" because she'd used a different amount of cinnamon and wanted my opinion. My opinion is that I have eaten more coffee cake in the past six minutes than in the preceding six months, but I did not say this because I am not an idiot.

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Thanksgiving itself arrived with the particular chaos that defines my family, which is to say everyone arrived at once, started four conversations simultaneously, and within eleven minutes someone had brought up politics. (It was Uncle Dave. It is always Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave has the situational awareness of a golden retriever and twice the volume.)

I stood in the kitchen watching my mother coordinate the preparation of fourteen dishes with the focused intensity of a general deploying troops, and I felt something shift in my chest. It was a feeling I did not entirely have a word for, which is notable because I am a person who works with words professionally and I have never once described myself as a person who lacks words. It was something in the vicinity of — and I am going to need you to bear with me here — *home*.

Not the good, warm, Norman Rockwell home. Not the Instagram-filter home with the golden light and the laughing family and everyone looking effortlessly beautiful in cable-knit sweaters. The *real* home. The home that is loud and slightly maddening and smells like coffee cake and bird-level political discourse from Uncle Dave and the particular mustiness of a guest room that has not had its sailboat wallpaper changed since the Carter administration.

The home where your mother has already called you twice this week to tell you about a segment she saw on the news and is now looking at you across a kitchen full of steam and noise with an expression that says *I made you*, *you catastrophic little person*, *and I would do it again*.

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The gravy boat incident, for the record, occurred when I was attempting to help. This is the key detail my mother glosses over. I was *helping*. I picked up the gravy boat to move it from the counter to the table, it slipped — because it is, I will remind everyone, cracked — and a modest quantity of gravy landed on the tablecloth my mother's mother brought over from Poland, which my mother will tell you about every Thanksgiving and also most Tuesdays.

There was a silence.

Then my mother said, "That's okay, honey."

Which was somehow worse than anything else she could have said, because "that's okay, honey" in my mother's voice is not reassurance. It is a filing. She is logging the incident. It will be retrieved at a moment of her choosing, possibly at my wedding, possibly at my eulogy.

I cleaned it up. We ate dinner. My father and Uncle Dave argued about something for forty minutes. Aunt Rosalie told a story about her flight that lasted longer than the actual flight. My nieces ran laps around the table until someone — not me, I am blameless — knocked over a glass of grape juice, which put the gravy boat incident into historical perspective.

And then it was over, the way Thanksgiving always is, all at once, and the house got quiet, and my mother made decaf, and my father fell asleep in his chair, and I sat at the kitchen table where I had sat as a child doing homework, eating cereal, catastrophically navigating adolescence, and I thought: *I flew five hours for this.*

And then I thought: *Good.*

I leave in the morning. I always do. But tonight, the ceramic rooster is on the counter where it belongs, the coffee cake is wrapped in foil on the second shelf of a refrigerator I know better than my own, and somewhere in the hallway, a thirteen-year-old me is silently screaming from a school photo.

Home is the place that keeps the evidence.