The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
“You’ve had plenty, Noah. You’re too heavy for seconds.”
My mother said it in the same voice she used to tell people the rolls were on the sideboard. She did not raise it. She never had to. She took the plate out of my son’s two hands, stepped on the pedal of the trash can at the end of her kitchen counter, and scraped it clean with his own fork.
It was his second plate, and a small one. He had cleaned his first and carried it back to the counter himself.
One slice of turkey. A spoon of mashed potatoes. A roll.
I heard the fork go across the plate three times.
There were twenty-two of us in that farmhouse. The dining room table had both leaves in, and Uncle Ed had butted two folding tables up against the end of it so the whole line ran clear through the wide doorway into the front room. From any chair at that table you could see the kitchen counter and the trash can and my nine-year-old boy standing beside it with his hands still out in front of him, holding nothing.
Nineteen relatives looked down at their own plates.
Not all at once, and not easily. My cousin Lisa came half up out of her chair, and her husband Mike touched her arm, and she sat back down. My brother Jeff’s shoulders went tight, and his wife Kim laid her hand on his sleeve and kept it there. Then every one of them found something to look at.
I want to be fair about that, because I have had a long time to think about it. They were not bad people. They were people who had eaten at Gloria Pruitt’s table for forty years, and every one of them had learned the same thing I had: when she starts in on somebody, you find something interesting in your green beans and you wait for it to be over. That was how our family got through a holiday. I had done it myself more times than I can count.
But it had never been my son standing there before.
I was up before the fork stopped.
I did not go to my mother. I went to Noah. I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades, and I could feel him breathing in little short pulls the way he does when he is working hard not to cry in front of people.
“Go get your coat, bud,” I said. “And get the pecan pie off the sideboard. The one with the foil on it. That’s ours.”
He looked up at me. His ears were bright red.
“Are we in trouble?”
“No, sir. Not one bit. Coat and pie.”
He went.
My mother rinsed the fork under the tap and laid it in the drainer. “Sit down, Jessica. I’m the only one in this family who will tell that child the truth, and you know it. Somebody has to love him enough.”
I did not answer her. I had answered her before, and I will get to that.
I went to the stove.
Let me back up just far enough for you to understand what was on that stove and whose it was.
My dad died six years ago, in March. Thanksgiving had always been at the farmhouse, eleven miles north of Sedalia on a gravel road, and the first November without him my mother announced she was not up to cooking for a crowd on a bad hip and a widow’s check. Nobody else offered. So I did.