She'd told herself she wasn't waiting. She'd believed it for about forty minutes.
That was how long she'd managed to sit in her apartment without checking her phone - a personal record for Thanksgiving, which was saying something. She'd muted the parade on television because the cheerfulness was making her feel worse, poured a glass of Riesling she wasn't going to drink, and propped a research paper in her lap that she hadn't turned a page of since noon.
Her father's name sat at the top of her contacts with a small house emoji beside it, which she'd added two years ago in a moment of optimism that now felt more embarrassing than she cared to examine. She'd kept him in her favorites long after the calls became less frequent, long after she'd learned to stop expecting him to pick up on the first ring. The habit of a daughter who called her dad for everything - she just hadn't been able to delete it.
She'd been watching that house emoji since nine in the morning.
He'd mentioned, the week before, that the firm was taking the full holiday week. Partners' decision, he'd said at their monthly dinner, the scheduled one they'd established after the divorce as a gesture toward maintained connection, the one that had never quite evolved into anything warmer than calendar maintenance. I'll have some time. He hadn't followed that with anything. She'd waited. He'd ordered the salmon.
She'd carried that detail - I'll have some time - through all of October and into November, the way she carried things that might turn into something good. He had time. Time was convertible. Time was the one thing you needed to do almost anything, including call your daughter on Thanksgiving.
He had not called.
Her mother was less of a surprise. Her mother was consistent in her patterns, and her patterns had been established clearly in the years after the divorce: birthday calls, Christmas texts, occasional voicemails in response to health updates that Natalie had learned to package as non-emergencies so her mother wouldn't panic before she finished a glass of wine. Thanksgiving hadn't been on the schedule in four years. Natalie had no idea why she'd thought this year would be different.
That was the part that ached - not the disappointment itself, which she'd built up enough scar tissue around to manage, but the fact that she kept hoping anyway. Every holiday she walked back in expecting something. She should know better by now. She did know better. She just couldn't stop.
She waited until four o'clock. Then she picked up her keys.
The crying started on 101, somewhere in the stretch between the city and the headlands where the road curved out over the water. It wasn't the dignified kind. It was the ugly kind - chest heaving, nose running, the whole embarrassing production she generally reserved for when she was absolutely certain no other human being was within earshot. She cried through the Waldo Tunnel and she cried through the bridge stretch and she cried until she couldn't see the road, and then she pulled onto the shoulder with her hazards blinking and sat there and let it finish.
Four minutes. She watched the clock.
Pull it together, Natalie. You have been doing this for twelve years.
She was twenty-six years old. She had a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins and a postdoctoral research position at UCSF that people applied for from twelve countries, and an apartment in the Mission district that was small and bright and entirely hers. She'd built everything she had without a safety net - no parents saying come home when it gets hard, no family money smoothing out the gaps between paychecks, no one waiting at the end of any road she'd traveled. She'd built it anyway.
The fact that a holiday could still do this to her was not something she was willing to let anyone see.
She pulled the visor down and looked at herself in the small mirror.
Her eyes were a disaster. Pink-rimmed and swollen, mascara tracking faint shadows toward her cheekbones, her face blotched and raw. She looked like exactly what she was - a grown woman who'd spent Thanksgiving afternoon alone in her apartment, waiting for two people who had decided, some years ago, that their own lives were more important than their daughter.
She reached into her bag for her makeup case.
The foundation went on first, the rosé-tinted one she'd matched to her skin precisely at a counter because if you were going to do something you might as well do it right. She tapped it across her cheeks and forehead with her fingertips, smoothing, blending, watching the blotchiness disappear under an even, neutral surface. Then the concealer - the full-coverage cream she kept for hard days. She dotted it beneath each eye in small circles until the puffiness was invisible.
She had gotten very good at this.
Not just the makeup. All of it - the whole mechanism of presenting as composed, as fine, as slightly tired but nothing serious. She'd started learning it at fourteen, sitting across from her parents at the kitchen table while they used careful, reasonable voices to explain that the family was changing shape. We both love you very much. You'll see us both all the time. Nothing important will change.
She'd believed them. The following Thanksgiving she'd eaten turkey at her father's apartment with his new girlfriend's children while her mother spent Christmas in Santa Barbara with people Natalie had never met. She'd understood then that what they meant by nothing important will change was that their own lives wouldn't change, and her role in those lives was something more flexible.
