The Thanksgiving I Did Not Cook
“Thirty-two plates,” I said, and tried to make it sound like a joke.
Pearl did not laugh. She looked at the turkeys. Then she looked at my face, slowly, the way you look at a cake you suspect is about to fall.
“For your mother-in-law’s table,” she said.
“For Mavis’s table.”
“And who is cooking it?”
“Me.”
“By yourself.”
I shrugged. “Garth is going to carve.”
Pearl set her basket on the little shelf by the register. She was a small woman, and she stood very straight. “Opal,” she said quietly, “I have watched you haul pie boxes up and down the church steps for five years, and I have never once seen anyone take the other end. I do not say this to be unkind. But what your husband calls helping sounds to me like a man standing on the bank while he watches you go under, and calling it moral support.”
The clerk had stopped scanning. The man behind Pearl studied the candy rack with enormous attention.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. My eyes had gone hot and stupid.
Pearl patted my arm. “I am not telling you to do anything,” she said. “I am telling you somebody saw. Here.” She took the receipt pad from the register without asking and wrote her number on the back of a coupon. “Our church dinner runs at noon tomorrow, same as every year. Ninety people. This year the grocery order for it got lost between here and the warehouse in Macon, and I have eleven pounds of ham, a prayer, and four women who are too old to be working at that hour. If you ever find yourself with food and nowhere good for it to go, you call me. Any hour. I mean that.”
I put the coupon in my coat pocket and pushed my cart out to the car. I told myself I would never use it.
I worked fourteen hours that Wednesday.
“I could use a hand with the pies.”
“I’ve got a call with Ivan at three. Big stuff. You know how it is.” He opened the fridge, took a beer, and left.
At four, Mavis arrived to “inspect the table.” She had me set it with her good china, the gold-rimmed set that had belonged to her own mother, thirty-two places, forks on the left and name cards in her own careful calligraphy. She stood at the head of the table and moved one knife a quarter of an inch.
“It will do,” she said, “if everything else is perfect.”
She stayed an hour. She sat in my kitchen chair, drank my coffee, told me that the pie crusts looked pale, and remarked that Roxanne Upton had once told her the Methodist ladies’ sweet potato casserole was the only one worth eating in the county.
“I have told her,” Mavis said, “that mine is better.”
It was not hers. It was my grandmother’s recipe, the one with the brown sugar pecan crust, the one I had written out for Mavis on an index card the first year I married into the family. She had since started telling people it was a Thorpe recipe. I had heard her say it at church, at the garden club, at the Rotary breakfast, to the woman who ran the county fair. I had also noticed that the blue ribbon from the fair, in the spring, had gone to my casserole entered under Mavis’s name. I never said a word about that, either.