Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is the Whittaker family’s first major holiday without Annie, and a hinge between bereavement and tentative renewal. As Liz, John, and Tommy welcome Maribeth to their table, the holiday temporarily makes them feel like a family again; when Maribeth calls home, however, her father repeats his demand that she stay away until the pregnancy is over. The day’s warmth and rejection unfold side by side, linking the Whittakers’ effort to live with loss to Maribeth’s struggle to find a place where she belongs.

A Holiday After Loss

In the months after Annie’s death, the Whittakers’ household has contracted around absence. Tommy avoids the kitchen table, where eating without his sister is unbearable, and often takes food to his room or eats standing beside the stove. Liz and John have also withdrawn from shared meals and from one another; instead of naming their grief, they quarrel over small household tasks. The family’s ordinary routines have become reminders of the child who is no longer there, and being together can feel harder than hiding separately.

Tommy describes this collapse to Maribeth at the lake. He tells her that after Annie died his parents stopped talking to him and to each other, that his mother rarely cooked and his father came home late, and that the house felt empty wherever he looked. He sometimes speaks to Annie at night, imagining she may hear him. Maribeth listens, takes his hand, and understands his telling as a way of briefly bringing his sister close. Later, with her support, Tommy tries to interrupt the family’s silence: he tells his parents they are still alive, that Annie would hate what has happened to them, and suggests they spend time together again. His mother turns away and his father says it is too late, but the invitation marks a change in Tommy’s willingness to act against their isolation.

The Invitation and the Gathering

As Thanksgiving approaches, Liz invites Maribeth to join the family. Maribeth initially intends to work at Jimmy D's, where she expects to help serve the few customers who come for a holiday meal. She does not want to intrude, and she is accustomed to having nowhere to go. Liz objects that she is too far along in her pregnancy to be working so hard. The invitation is not merely practical hospitality: it offers Maribeth a place in a household that has itself been fractured by loss.

Tommy helps persuade her to come. After they have worked on their school assignments together, they talk in his truck, and Maribeth admits that she wants to be with him and feels relieved when he arrives at the restaurant, her room, or his parents’ kitchen. She has grown more sensitive and frightened as the pregnancy advances; the kindness of Tommy’s family moves her to tears. She says she does not know how to thank Liz for helping her with school and with everything else. Her acceptance of the invitation thus carries both gratitude and the need for connection.

The Whittakers make the day ceremonially welcoming. Liz lays out the family’s best lace tablecloth, a wedding present that had belonged to John’s grandmother, and the china reserved for special occasions. Maribeth wears a dark green silk dress; Liz dresses up in blue, and John and Tommy wear suits. Maribeth brings Liz gold chrysanthemums and a box of chocolates, which Tommy eagerly eats. The carefully prepared table and gifts set the holiday apart from the family’s months of diminished routine. After lunch, they sit together by the fireplace, and Liz finds that Annie’s absence, though still present in her thoughts, hurts less with Maribeth and Tommy nearby.

The gathering also allows John and Liz to test a cautious return to ordinary intimacy. John comes home from work with Tommy, having called ahead to ask when they should arrive for dinner; he kisses Liz carefully and watches her response. Their closeness remains unfamiliar after a long separation, but the gesture contrasts with the earlier pattern of distance and conflict. Later, Liz and John take a walk while Tommy drives Maribeth, and the four agree to meet back at home for a movie. The family is not restored to what it was before Annie died, but for this holiday it can share a meal, make plans, and spend time together.

A Call Home, and Its Rejection

The day also turns Maribeth toward the family from whom she has been separated. After Tommy takes her to Annie’s grave, they return before his parents. Maribeth asks whether it would bother them if she called home, wanting to wish her family a happy Thanksgiving. Tommy assures her it is all right and leaves her to place the call. Her mother answers amid the noise of the family gathering, where relatives and children have assembled, and at first struggles to hear her.

When Maribeth’s father takes the phone, he asks whether the pregnancy is over. She tells him it is not and tries to explain why she called. He orders her not to contact the family until she has dealt with the pregnancy and the baby is gone from her care, repeating the no-contact condition he had imposed before she left home. Her mother cries in the background, and Maribeth thinks she hears her younger sister objecting, but her father ends the call. Maribeth is left sobbing with the receiver down; Tommy returns and is horrified by her distress. The brief call reverses the holiday’s movement toward belonging: the welcome she has found with the Whittakers sharpens the pain of her rejection at home.

Meaning and Aftermath

Thanksgiving does not resolve either family’s grief or conflict. The Whittakers remain bereaved, and Maribeth remains separated from her parents, despite her attempt to bridge that distance. Yet the holiday makes a different kind of family relation possible for a time. The Whittakers include her without demanding that she explain herself, while she brings warmth and companionship into a home where grief had emptied meals and conversation of meaning.

The day’s paired scenes make its significance lie in contrast rather than in a simple reconciliation. Around the lace-covered table, the Whittakers’ shared meal offers a modest counter to months of avoidance; over the telephone, Maribeth encounters the boundary her father still enforces. The holiday therefore marks both a fragile recovery of connection and the persistence of separation. Its welcome is real, but it cannot erase the family she has lost access to or decide what her future will be.