Page 1 of Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall
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The turkey sat in the middle of the table, cooling and congealing and generally looking unappetizing. It wasn’t even a real turkey, just a pre-cooked turkey crown that had come with shrink-wrapped veggies on the side, an all-in-one Thanksgiving dish that looked like she’d bought it at a minimart. She should have done better, Maggie thought with regret. It was just that neither of them had really cared about Thanksgiving this year, and she hadn’t had the energy for anything more. But now that she and Ben were sitting in front of it, she wished she’d gone to a little bit more effort, tried to make this something like the Thanksgivings they remembered.
“Shall we say what we’re thankful for?” she suggested brightly, and her son simply stared at her.
Maggie opened her mouth, closed it again. The trouble was, she was just sotired, and all the truisms for this situation—time heals all wounds, it’s okay to feel sad—had been said and done to death. And really, that was what this was about. Death.
Thirteen months on, they still hadn’t gotten past Matt’s death. And why should they? Thirteen months, Maggie had learned, was pretty much nothing when it came to grief, especially when you had lost someone as vital to your life as your husband or your father. Thirteen months was just the beginning, the veritable tip of an enormous iceberg that stretched coldly and darklymilesbelow the ocean, seething with all sorts of emotions that were so utterly exhausting to acknowledge, never mind examine and process. Grief, she’d discovered, was far more complex than she’d wanted it to be.
“Should we just go?” she asked instead, her words falling into the silence of their yawning dining room like tiny pebbles into a pond. They were seated at one end of a table that could host fourteen, the house echoing emptily all around them.
Ben looked up, which Maggie told herself was a win. Hours, even days, could go by without her son looking her in the eye.
“What?” he asked.
“Should we just go?” Her voice came out stronger; she was getting into this. “Forget the turkey.” Turkeycrown. “Let’s do something different today. We can drive to Starr’s Fall and check out the new house.”
Ben shook his head slowly, skeptical, even suspicious of such an idea. “But we’re not moving till January.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t look at it now,” Maggie argued. She had a sudden burning desire, aneed, like an itch all over her skin, to get out of this house with its eleven-foot-high ceilings and cathedral foyer, its sweeping double staircase and its kitchen that was as big as a basketball court. Well, pickleball, maybe, but still, it was huge and full of Carrera marble and gleaming chrome, everything look-at-me shiny and unrelentingly hard. She’d loved the house, or thought she had… once. She didn’t anymore.
“Let’s go,” she said again, and for emphasis, she slapped her hands on the dining-room table, hard enough for her palms to sting.
Ben simply stared. Her son was good at staring. He had several different kinds. Like the blank-eyed I-absolutely-don’t-care look that made Maggie shrivel inside. Or the narrowed death stare of doom for when she was embarrassing him, which was, Maggie had discovered—to her regret, shame, and exasperation—very easy to do. And worst of all, the one that cut her to the heart every time, the silent swamped stare of misery, when she knew how wretched he felt and that there was nothing she could do about it.
Except shehaddone something about it. In the last month alone, she’d withdrawn her son from school and bought a house in what he’d insisted was his favorite place in the world, Starr’s Fall, Connecticut. She’d also sunk a hefty chunk of Matt’s life insurance into a business she really had no idea how to run.
Whether sheshouldhave done those things was another matter entirely, but she had, and now they were here, waiting out the rest of the semester before their real life in Starr’s Fall—whateverthatlooked like—could begin.
“Let’s just go,” she said again, and for the first time in longer than Maggie cared to remember, a light sparked in her son’s eyes.
“What… justdriveto Starr’s Fall?” he asked incredulously. “Today?”
“Why not? It’s only an hour.”
“An hour and a half,” he corrected her, and she gave a grimacing nod of acknowledgment. Fine, an hour and a half. An hour fifteen if she drove fast, not that sheeverwould, considering how Matt had died, but…
“Let’s do it!” Now she was starting to sound a little manic, like an extra onMickey Mouse Clubhouse, or maybe like she’d inhaled helium. Either way, she knew she needed to moderate her tone. “Seriously, why not?” she said in a quieter, more reasonable voice. “We don’t need to stay here if we don’t want to, Ben.”
“Isn’t Thanksgiving, like, the worst day of the year to drive?” Ben asked as he hunched his shoulders. “For traffic and accidents and stuff?”
“Well, yes,” Maggie allowed, because she was determined always to take her son’s concerns seriously, especially around driving. He hadn’t gotten into a car for weeks after Matt’s death, save for the limousine they’d taken to his funeral. “But I think it’s the Tuesday or Wednesday before, or the Sunday after, that are the trafficky days. On the day itself, most people aren’t driving. They’re eating turkey.” Cue them both glancing at the turkey crown in the middle of the table, uneaten and looking even more unappetizing. The once-golden skin on top had started to shrivel.
“We could be there before two,” Maggie continued as she glanced at her watch. If they’d left five minutes ago.
A minute passed while Ben simply stared. This stare was yet another in his repertoire, the vacant I’m-acting-like-I’m-not-really-here one that Maggie still hadn’t figured out how to handle. “Ben?”
“Okay.” He nodded slowly, his shaggy hair sliding onto his face once more. “Fine. Let’s do it.”
“Great.” Maggie jumped up from the table, glad to be in motion. She grabbed the turkey in its foil tray and dumped it, soggy veggies and all, straight into the trash. “We can get something on the way, your pick.”
“Really?” A faint lilt of interest in her son’s voice had her smiling.
“Absolutely.” Then she grabbed her coat, her shoes, her keys, while Ben stood by the front door, looking like he was debating whether he should actually get into this idea.
“What are we even going todothere?” he asked.
“Look around the town?”
