Chapter 9 - The Thanksgiving of Silence
The fourth Thursday of November arrived with a dusting of dry, powdery snow that settled over the slate roofs of Evanston like powdered sugar.
For the first time in twenty-nine years, I did not spend the holiday in the kitchen at Foxhollow.
I did not wake up at six o’clock to brine a twenty-pound heritage turkey that Joanne had ordered from an organic farm in Michigan.
I did not spend three hours peeling shallots, skimming the fat from the giblet stock, or using a silver butter knife to scrape the burnt edges off the Parker House rolls so Paul wouldn't make a sarcastic comment about my domestic incompetence in front of Uncle Greg.
I woke up at eight o’clock.
The sunlight was streaming through the high dormer windows of my bedroom, painting long, pale rectangles of gold across the white oak floorboards.
I stayed in bed for an hour.
I read an architectural biography I had purchased six months ago and had never had the time to open. I listened to the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock in the stairwell—a clock I had repaired myself, whose gimbals and pendulums moved with absolute, frictionless precision.
At ten o’clock, I made myself breakfast: two eggs poached in butter, a thick slice of sourdough toast from the bakery around the corner, and a pot of black coffee brewed from beans roasted in Milwaukee.
I ate at my kitchen table, looking out at the snow falling through the bare branches of the birch trees.
At noon, my front doorbell rang once.
I walked down the stairs, opened the door, and found Sarah Jenkins standing on the stoop, wearing a bright red wool scarf, carrying a covered porcelain casserole dish that smelled intensely of roasted sweet potatoes and toasted pecans.
Behind her stood her husband, Jim—a retired high school physics teacher with a white beard and kind, crinkling eyes—holding two bottles of Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley.
“We have an extra seat at our table,” Sarah said, her voice matter-of-fact, completely free of pity. “And Jim doesn't know how to carve a turkey without destroying the grain. We need an engineer.”
I looked at them.
The cold air was crisp, smelling of woodsmoke from the neighbors’ chimneys.
“Let me get my coat,” I said.
The Jenkins house in Oak Park was old, warm, and noisy.
Their three grown children—a resident in pediatric oncology, an industrial designer, and a twenty-year-old senior at Northwestern—were crowded around the kitchen island with their partners, arguing loudly about Big Ten football and municipal transit policy while a golden retriever with gray around his muzzle begged for celery stalks.
Nobody asked me about Mercer Systems.
Nobody asked me why my family was not in attendance.
When we sat down at the table—fourteen people squeezed around an expandable maple table that had two mismatched wooden chairs from the kitchen tucked into the ends—Jim Jenkins stood up, raised his glass of wine, and looked around the room.
“To good steel,” he said, looking directly at me with a wink. “And to the people who know how to keep the roof over our heads.”
“To good steel,” the table chorused.
I drank the wine. It was rich, earthy, and warm.
Later that evening, after the pumpkin pie had been reduced to a few crumbs and the younger kids were playing a board game in the living room, I stepped out onto the back porch to get some cold air.
The snow was falling more heavily now, silencing the distant sound of the Eisenhower Expressway.
I pulled my business phone from my coat pocket.
There was one automated notification from our enterprise security software:
ALERT: System prevented three unauthorized access attempts to the Asterline Project Portal (IP Origin: Naperville, IL - ISP: Comcast Commercial). Target Account: [WO-135-Riverfront]. User credentials used: [[email protected]]. Status: IP PERMANENTLY BLOCKED.
I looked at the screen for two seconds.
Paul was still sitting in his darkened office in Naperville, staring at the login screen, hoping against hope that some digital miracle would restore the files that had kept his empire afloat for three years.
He was still trying to find a way back into the room.
I tapped the screen, cleared the notification, and slipped the phone back into my pocket.
I looked up at the winter sky.
The clouds were low, heavy with snow, but through a small rift in the overcast above the trees, a single cold star was shining with absolute, unyielding clarity.
I was twenty-nine years old.
I had forty-three employees whose salaries were paid by the brilliance of our work.
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I had an apartment with thick masonry walls and a kitchen where no one would ever tell me to put on an apron.
And for the first time since I was an eleven-year-old girl sitting in a hospital waiting room with my hand over my mouth, I felt entirely, perfectly at home.
