The Thanksgiving I Did Not Cook
I should tell you what “of course” had cost me by then.
I am thirty-three. I grew up in Sutter Ridge, Georgia, a town with one stoplight, two feed stores, and a Methodist church that has been feeding people on Thanksgiving since before my grandmother was born. I married Garth when I was twenty-eight, in that church, with his mother in the front pew wearing a color she had no business wearing to a wedding. I do the books part-time for the feed store on Route 9, from a desk in our spare bedroom, and the money goes into an account in my name that Mavis has never once thought to ask about. Garth earns the larger paycheck and has never let a room forget it.
The first year I cooked for twelve, and Mavis said the gravy was a little thin. The second year it was sixteen. The third, nineteen. In the fourth year I ran a fever of 101 and a half on the morning of the holiday, and I stood at the stove in a sweatshirt with a bucket of ice water on the floor beside me, because Mavis had told her friends that she was “sure Opal would not let us down.” I did not let them down. I served nineteen people while my vision went white at the edges, and when I finally sat down at my own table at six o’clock, Garth leaned over, patted my hand, and told his mother’s friend from the garden club that I was “a trooper.”
Nobody asked if I had eaten. Nobody washed a pan. I scrubbed the roasting pans alone until midnight, and then I threw up in the downstairs bathroom with the fan on so no one would hear.
That was the year before this one. I think of it as the year something quietly broke, though it did not make any noise.
After Mavis left that Tuesday, I stood in the kitchen and looked at the pages. They were typed in a neat serif font. At the top, Mavis had written a heading: THE THORPE THANKSGIVING. Beneath it, a numbered list of thirty names, each with notes. Mr. so-and-so, no shellfish. Mrs. so-and-so, a seat near the bathroom. The Rotary treasurer, a chair that would not squeak.
Not one line on any of the three pages said anything about who would be doing the work.
Wednesday, I went to the store at seven in the morning with a list that ran onto the back of the page.
By the time I reached the register, my cart was heaped so high a boy from the bagging line had to come around and steady the pile of cream and butter. The total came to eleven hundred and eighty-six dollars. I paid it from my own account. It did not occur to me, standing there with my card in my hand, to ask Garth for the money, and I think that was the first small door opening, though I did not see it yet.
I was unloading onto the belt when I heard a voice behind me.
“Honey, are you feeding the army or the Baptists?”
I turned. Pearl Upton, seventy-one years old, with her gray hair set in the same soft curls she had worn since the Carter administration, stood behind me with a basket holding two cans of cranberry sauce and a bag of onions. I knew her the way you know most people in a town that size. Her husband Homer had sold cars on the Upton lot for forty years before their son Ivan took it over. She ran the kitchen committee at the Methodist church, and she was the best cook in three counties, a title she would have denied with a flap of her hand.