“Did you enjoy your time off?” asked one of them.

“You owe me sixteen hours,” said the boss. It would be easier to hear this sort of shit if I’d made some shinier memories, or accepted that the day after Thanksgiving is a work day at this place, or felt that Thanksgiving was still my favorite holiday.

It used to be, when I was little (and also when I was as tall as I am now, but thinner and with zits) and we went to my grandparents’ for five days in a row. Looking back I imagine that my parents must have dreaded those visits. So many days in close quarters, and nights in a lousy bed with your son in another, in the same room. At least we got a room with a door, and not just a pullout sofa; my grandfather and uncles all snored like walruses.

I can see how my surrogate-sibling time with my cousins just looked like work to them, like when we all packed onto my grandparents’ bed to watch MTV on their just-installed cable. The bed broke, and my Dad fixed it, sneaking tools and wood up and down from the basement while everyone else distracted my grandfather. He would have been somewhat mad at us and thoroughly contemptuous of Dad’s carpentry. If it had been possible, I’m sure Dad would have bought a new bed on the spot just to avoid that conversation.

“How do you like the accommodations?” I said to my parents thirty years later, five days ago, pointing out our new pullout sofa. We bought it just for them to sleep on, after my daughter and her friends broke the old one watching TV.

***

“Oof, get off me, you beastie,” my wife said one evening last week.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, and she said I should, as I got right back to my side of the bed. We don’t share our bedroom with anybody, though there’s nothing too conjugal about the place during a family sleepover. We go to bed spent and wake up talking about them all. Can we sleep in if they don’t? We go downstairs and are too aware of other adult bodies in our workaday personal space, the places the kids just stay out of, like the kitchen counters and the little downstairs bathroom, which acquires all sorts of pill bottles and devices and bags and smells.

Still we want them here. We chose to have Thanksgiving here, where we could not-ruin the turkey, and then put away our own serving utensils in the places we know they go. And my parents’ pleasures are more portable than my kids’, which involve other teens and access to a liquid-cooled gaming CPU. My parents just want cable news and short shopping trips, and company.

Dad tells me about the things he’s bought and the conversations he’s having, mostly with himself, about money. I want to ask about what he tells me, by which I mean I want to reason with him, which is to say I want to somehow stop him from spending thousands on stupid crap while nickel and diming my Mom about groceries. But he is elderly, enough that it feels rude to show him up or put him down or hurt his feelings – even though I wouldn’t mean to do any of those things. But he is also not so old as to need me to take anything over, to start stealing keys or power of attorney. So I listen and I try to relate.

He wants to buy my son a big fancy R/C airplane, the kind used to train real pilots, he says. Not a crazy idea. I think of how I required Julian to join us at an air show, last year, feeling I was doing Dad a favor and my kid was doing one for me. He actually loved it, and still talks about it, especially the part when they told all the bystanders to back up while they started the B-17. We, and a few other combustion junkies, moved closer instead.

This is not like starting a Camry. There are four ancient umpteen-cylinder billion-horsepower engines that want to start even less than I want to get up in the morning. We watch and listen. It’s not promising. The thing seems more like a recalcitrant wood splitter than an airplane. It’s like everyone, including the engines, forgets the wings and propellers are even there. The metal fights, and the fuel spits, and you want to back away, and then lean in like you’re qualified to help. One at a time they finally light, and then BOOM all the struggle turns to action, the whole day blowing back through the hair and hats of us, blended in with a bunch of grinning veterans. The three of us moved closer in, to it and each other, laughing into the great blue heaving haze.

***

“Nope, nope,” my Mom says, catching her breath. “If you keep rubbing my back, I’ll cry.” She is leaning against our kitchen table as we load the car for them to go. Until she says something, we forget to notice (and then ignore) the oxygen tube that’s not up her nose, which it is most of the time. I am rubbing her back because I don’t know what else to do. She says she doesn’t want to use up her “little guy,” the extra tank she’s saving for when they make a bathroom stop in an hour. I start speaking and then stop, not asking why she left herself this gap before leaving the house. I am not sure about her calculations, but I’m not qualified to help. I can only walk her out to the car, where the machine plugs into the lighter (for the cigarettes that give you emphysema) and she can breathe easy, despite my Dad’s driving.

We say good bye and I have a miserable rest of the day. Really, I’m in a good enough mood as we run around town. It’s only as we get close to dinner, and come back home again, and yes, I am going to serve everyone leftovers, and no, I don’t care if you all hate it, that I begin the spiral. The lousy mood, the admonishment to appreciate the good parts that seem so rickety and isolated, the shame at my ingratitude for this world that’s killing my Mom and yours, the things I cut crooked at the craft table I’ve wanted to be at for days, and the music that sounds like a dirge no matter what song I play.

***

The next day, my wife volunteered at a church. She didn’t invite me and I didn’t ask to come. I did help my son clean up the workbench, which is a good deed too, I guess. We threw out junk and sorted supplies and tools, his new ones and my older ones and a few of the heavy things of my grandfather’s, which Dad probably used to fix a broken bed once. Julian had brought down his computer, to play ‘50s-style music from a video game set in a post-apocalyptic Boston. We found it easy to laugh at “Crawl Out Through the Fallout,” down in a cold hole with the dust and rust, the humor as wrong as the moment was true.

And then, and then. Kristin and I went to the home of a friend with two young children, bearing a big box of our pre-loved books. I’m not sure what I expected, but the boy (older) picked two books to read while his little sister hoarded all the others. She seemed more excited to add up her winnings than to read them. I found enough heart and breath to ask if I could read to her. We read about Martha, the dog who can speak if she eats enough alphabet soup, and Bill and Pete, the crocodile and bird who prevent humans from making luggage out of their loved ones. I snuck peeks at her digesting the weirdness and darkness, but was careful not to interrupt her word-sounding and reading, in places, which got better as we went along. I did too. Again, a day after decades too late, my spiral saves itself, finding again a forgotten propeller to blow all the poison away.