Page 36 of A Storybook Wedding

“But we saw you on the television! She is lovely, Nathan.”

“There’s a lot to unpack there, Mom, but the gist is that we are not a thing. Very sorry to disappoint you.”

“I saw the way she looked at you,” my mother insists.

“Hey, little bro,” Katie says, wiping her hands on her jeans as she comes out of the bathroom down the hall.

“Thank God,” I reply. “What’s up, Kay? Good to see you.” I give her a hug.

“Mom giving you shit for working those pipes on Fallon?”

“I am not giving him shit!” Mom contests.

“Tell us about that chick you were with,” Katie continues. “Spicy little number, huh?”

“Sweet Jesus,” I reply, rolling my eyes.

“I’d do her!” Johnny calls out from in front of the seventy-inch TV screen in the living room. Not even so much as a hello out of him. Heaven forbid he tried a greeting before laying claim to a female who’s not my sister.

“Hey, Uncle Nate,” Lila says, having emerged from her bedroom. She gives me a weak hug. “Don’t listen to them. I thought the whole thing was pretty embarrassing for you. I mean, what even was that song?”

This is it, you guys. This delightful scene is my Thanksgiving.

I suffer through it for the next three hours, during which my mother only makes us rewatch the segment on the DVR twice (because once was not enough). I stress eat two overloaded plates of turkey, stuffing, candied yams, homemade applesauce, and green bean casserole, along with a small slice of each of three different pies (apple, pumpkin, and pecan). By the time I’m done gorging myself, I feel so full that there’s no space left for anyone’s comments inside me. I power nap in my dad’s old recliner while Johnny screams at the New York Giants with the gusto of a man who actually believes they can hear him. The screaming makes it so that I can’t fully fall asleep, but that’s just par for the course (to borrow a term from my dad), when sure enough, on the screen, the camera cuts to none other than—Seriously? Why?—Questlove.

“Lots of celebs here today,” says the announcer. “There’s Questlove and his lovely girlfriend. Oh, did you see his Kazoo Karaoke Bomb last night on The Tonight Show? It was classic.”

The other sportscaster replies, “Did you know that guy up there was the guy who wrote Work?”

“Oh yeah?” announcer number one says.

“True story,” announcer number two says. “He should stick to writing, if you know what I mean,” he adds with a hearty chortle.

The trio on the couch (Johnny, Dad, and Katie) look at me. “Oh!” Johnny cries. “Sick burn, man!”

And that is my cue to leave.

I pull up the schedule for New Jersey Transit on my phone. Trains are running once an hour, and the next one’s in thirty-five minutes. I get up and hit the head, then pop into the kitchen and tell Mom I should get going. She hastily dries her hands off on a dish towel and gives me a big hug. “Next time, you bring her,” she whispers in my ear. Then she summons my father to take me to the station. By the time he gets himself together and we arrive, I’ve got ten minutes to get up on the platform. We shake hands and he wishes me luck with my deadline, telling me to “be the ball,” not that I have any idea what he’s talking about.

By the time I get back on the train, which is thankfully mostly empty, I sink into a seat and exhale deeply. Something about visiting with my family takes a lot out of me. I pull out my phone and check it. Only a handful of new texts, and it’s mostly just more of the same nonsense from earlier, except for one new text from CJ from a little over an hour ago.

Hey, the text reads, just checking on you. I hope your dinner is going okay and that your family didn’t upset you even more.

I consider my response, then begin typing. It was fine. On the train home now. Hope your holiday is going well also.

No more than thirty seconds pass when the phone vibrates again.

It’s been a crazy evening. I’ll be leaving soon. Can I call you when I get out of here?

Sure, I reply.

I proceed to spend the next twenty minutes going through my old emails from back when I was hired by Matthias. I remember receiving a personnel handbook. I never read it, of course. But I think I still have it, so I do a search. After rereading several onboarding emails, I finally find the one from HR. I download the handbook to my phone and comb through the table of contents. Page thirty-three: Personal Relationships in the Workplace. I scan through it, as the entire beginning is all about familial relationships and nepotism. Then I get to the section about Intimate Consensual Relationships.

It reads as follows:

Intimate consensual relationships between faculty members and students can create an imbalance of power in an academic setting, resulting in an elevated risk for the University’s mission of fairness and equality to be undermined. As a result, such relationships are strictly prohibited. (This does not apply to relationships between faculty members. For more information, see page 45.)

There may be instances where a faculty member has a preexisting intimate relationship with a student. While this is a manageable risk throughout the University as a whole, such student may not enroll in the program where the faculty member is employed. (Ex. A student of Theater Arts may not enroll in the Theater Arts program if his/her intimate partner is a Theater Arts faculty member.)

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