The Thanksgiving I Did Not Cook
At nine that night, Garth went upstairs to watch the game. Mavis went home. The house got quiet.
I sat down at the kitchen table. The first time all day.
Mavis’s pages were there, beside the salt shaker. I pulled the calculator out of the junk drawer and started adding.
Turkey one needed five hours. Turkey two needed six. They could not share the same oven shelf. The ham took the second oven. The dressing needed the first oven at the same temperature as the pies. The rolls needed the top rack for twenty minutes, and the sweet potatoes needed ninety. Thirty-two plates meant thirty-two hot servings placed at once, and Mavis had told me that she did not want to see a single dish come out of the kitchen more than two minutes after another.
It did not work. It could not work. Not for any person who has ever lived.
And I understood something then that made my stomach drop in a way it never had over any of Mavis’s cutting remarks. They did not care whether it was possible. They had not checked. It had never occurred to either of them to check. The only question in their minds was whether Opal would find a way, and for five years the answer had always been yes.
I looked at the thirty-two name cards. At the gold-rimmed plates. At the three typed pages with no line for me anywhere on them.
I thought about the question that had been sitting in the back of my head since Tuesday, quiet as a stone in a shoe. What would happen if I simply did not get up at four?
Not what would they say. Not how angry they would be. What would actually happen, in the real world, if for one morning, the person who made everything possible was not in the building.
At twenty past nine, I picked up my phone and opened an airline app. I will tell you the truth, I had no plan. I only wanted to see what a flight would cost. There was a seat on a six-fifteen to Tucson, where my cousin has a spare room and a dog who loves me. Two hundred and eighty dollars. I looked at it for a long time. I looked at my own name on the screen, the first time in years it had appeared on anything that was not a grocery receipt or a catering sheet.
I bought it.
Then I sat there with my heart going like a bird in a shoebox, and I took the coupon out of my coat pocket and called a number I had promised myself I would never use.
Pearl answered on the second ring, at ten at night, like a woman who had been waiting in her chair with her shoes on.
“Opal,” she said.
I told her everything in about ninety seconds. The thirty-two plates. The four a.m. The food. My plane. I said, “I cannot stay and I will not serve it. But I cannot throw out eleven hundred dollars of food either, and some of it is already cooked or prepped, and I do not know what to do.”
There was a long pause. I heard a clock ticking in her kitchen.