The November incident—Julia’s Thanksgiving Rebellion—had a rehearsed feel about it that Ginger only noticed after it was over, when she and Richard were in the car on the way to Glory’s. It was then, as she replayed their declarations in her head, that she realized Julia and Nick had taken turns talking, like characters in a play where the playwright decided to make all the dialogue of equal length. She imagined Nick timing it with his phone. Julia went first.
“Nick’s mom isn’t making Thanksgiving this year. She went to Texas.”
“To visit my uncle Brian. He’s my mom’s brother and he’s kinda sick.”
“That’s why she went. That’s why I’m staying here. So Nick’s not alone.”
When they seemed finished with their explanation, Ginger told them she was very sorry to hear about Nick’s uncle, but she didn’t understand why that meant Julia wasn’t coming to Thanksgiving.
“I don’t even like turkey,” Julia said as if that made a difference.
Ginger offered the obvious solution. “Nick doesn’t have to be alone. Bring him with you.
Grandma won’t care. You can come,” she told the boy.
They were in the living room, Nick and Julia squashed close together on the sofa, as if they wished they were one person. Nick, tall and gangly, knees rising high in front of him, fiddled with the small silver hoop at the edge of his unruly eyebrow. Ginger thought the hoop hole looked early-stage infected. She considered offering to check it out, but Nick interrupted her thoughts.
“Honestly?” He smirked and shook his head. “Your invitation? Doesn’t sound like you mean it.”
Emboldened, Julia stood her ground. “We’re not going. Why do you even care? Thanksgiving in our family is a total fraud.”
“What does that mean?” This was not the first time Ginger noticed it, that when Julia was with Nick it sometimes felt like they were speaking a language she didn’t understand. She glanced at Richard who shot her a back off look. Registered and ignored. “How is it a fraud?”
Julia used her fingers to count off the infractions. “No one ever says the truth. No one talks about anything real. No one wants to be there. Aunt Mimi’s whole family hates it. Wallace told me when they go to their other grandma’s they don’t sit doing nothing all day. They can be on their phones or go outside. They can go on the roof if they want. It isn’t so snobby and strict.”
Describing a meal at Glory’s as snobby was so off base it wasn’t worth addressing. But the roof? “Have you gone up on the roof?” Richard shot her another unappreciated warning look.
“That’s not the point,” Julia said.
Ginger nodded. If the point was that the Popkins were more fun, she wouldn’t argue. This was partly a matter of numbers. Mimi’s husband, Neil Popkin, was one of six siblings, all of whom had procreated prodigiously. Because of this, Mimi’s three boys, a dainty brood by Popkin standards, had twenty cousins, or maybe now it was up to twenty-five. The extended family included not just grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, but great aunts, second cousins, first cousins once removed.
There seemed to be enough of them to make their own country. The country of Popkin. Ginger believed, and Richard agreed, this was what attracted Mimi to Neil in the first place. He came with the protective shield of a clan.
Of course, Mimi would deny it. She was, or pretended to be, unaware of the benefit the chaos of the Popkin clan afforded her. Instead, she complained about how her house was always overfull, and given the size of her house, this was no small feat. Richard referred to the place as the Clue House, because it boasted a study, a library, and a billiard room. There was also a solarium, a media room, a dedicated closet for Neil’s fly-fishing equipment, and a carriage house out back, which Mimi was currently using as a studio, now that she was an artist. Quilts were her current thing. Before she started quilting, she’d been a real estate agent. Prior to that she owned a children’s furniture store.
She’d also sold organic cosmetics and ran a small food cooperative. This was in addition to her volunteer work, heading up all the boys’ booster clubs, spearheading the skate park, forming a committee to get rid of the geese in the pond near her house, and fighting to extend the hours of the public library.
By now, Ginger was used to the fact that none of her sister’s pursuits lasted very long.
Something was always wrong with them, eventually. It had been the same in college. Like a real-life Goldilocks, Mimi cycled through a big state school, a medium-sized university, and a small liberal arts college, transferring her way to her bachelor’s. After that there was half a year of a master’s in linguistics, two months of landscape architecture, and five days of a three-year midwifery program.
The problem with midwifery was too many bodily fluids, plus night work.
As to how many infected tonsils and swollen adenoids Neil, an ENT, had to cure to support a house like theirs, Ginger had no idea, but she assumed it was a lot. Her own house was closer in size to the home they’d grown up in, cozy in her words, or as Mimi would describe it, about a thousand square feet short of quaint.
But no matter how big it was, Mimi’s house was not big enough to handle the demands of the Popkin clan. Every relative—Ginger’s tiny family included—knew that the spare key was under the green watering can at the back door. There was an alarm system that was never used because the house was never unattended.
Describing her lack of alone time was almost a sport for Mimi. Her weekends were jammed with mandatory family get-togethers and weeknights booked because no Popkin could have a birthday without a full complaint of relatives coming over for coffee and cake. And it wasn’t just birthdays.
There was always an occasion to mark. An anniversary, a graduation, a hiring, a firing, someone sick, someone sad. It was brilliant, really. With three boys and a job that changed so frequently, Ginger struggled to keep up, the Popkins were the final impenetrable layer of Mimi’s hazmat suit, a tornado of activity protecting her from all undesirable parts of life, otherwise known as Glory.
Julia’s observation—that Thanksgiving at Glory’s wasn’t fun—was a fair one. Ginger now regretted not trying harder to convince Glory it was time that she and Richard host it for a change. But her mother had been adamant. Thanksgiving, she insisted, was her holiday.
“How about I organize some games?” Ginger proposed to Julia. “The library is running a
digital scavenger hunt. We could form teams. We can join online right now.” Julia rolled her eyes.
“Okay, how about charades? That would be fun. And if you’re on Grandma Glory’s team, you’re guaranteed to win.”
Her daughter let out an airy hoosh. “A scavenger hunt or charades? Really?”
“Okay, forget a game. Just come. If you want to go outside, go outside. Grandma won’t care.
She probably won’t even notice. Going outside is not a problem.”
“It’s not a problem because we are not going.” Emphasis communicated. Julia’s position was clear.
“Sorry, Jules. You have to come. Not coming is not an option.”
But apparently it was.