The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
Noah looked at her for a long time.
“Did it make you sad? When your mom did it?”
“Every Saturday of my life.”
“Then why’d you do it to me?”
I held my breath. Matt had turned the burner down and was standing very still.
“Because nobody ever came and carried the turkey out for me,” my mother said. “I thought that was just how it was done. I didn’t know any better until your mother showed me. And your Uncle Ed.”
She took one hand off her pocketbook and held it out a little way, not touching him, just held it there.
“There is not one thing wrong with you. You are a fine, strong, good boy, and you are just right the way you are. I should have been saying that to you since the day you were born.”
Noah put his hand in hers.
Then he leaned over, all of a sudden, the way kids do, and put his head against her church coat. My mother made a sound I had never heard out of her and put both arms around him and held on, with her pocketbook sliding off onto my floor.
I went and stood by Matt at the stove. He put his arm around me. Neither of us said anything.
After a while Noah sat up and wiped his nose.
“Grandma, are you hungry? We’ve got chili. Dad made it, it’s not too hot.”
“I could eat,” my mother said.
He got up and fixed her bowl himself. He put the cheese on and three crackers on the saucer, and carried it to her with both hands, careful, like the pie.
We ate at the kitchen table, the four of us, which is exactly how many it seats.
When Noah’s bowl was empty, I saw him look at the pot. Just a glance. Then at his grandmother.
My mother got up. She took his bowl to the stove and filled it herself, right to the line, and set it down in front of him.
“Seconds are a compliment to the cook,” she said. “Your father told me that.”
We had Christmas at my house that year. Every one of us, Matt included, plus Mr. Wallace from next door. Ed brought his chairs, eight of them this time. Jeff brought a table he had built out of two sawhorses and a sheet of plywood, and Kim brought a ham.
My mother came early to help. She peeled the potatoes sitting down, on account of her hip, and Noah mashed them.
Thanksgiving has been at our place every year since. I still buy the turkey. Mom brings the rolls and pays for the pies now, out of her own check, and will not hear a word about it.
She still says the wrong thing sometimes. She is sixty-eight, and Ed is right that it comes from someplace deep. But she has never once said it to Noah. And twice now I have heard her say to one of the little cousins, in that same plain voice she uses for telling people where the rolls are, “Honey, go on and get some more. There’s plenty.”
The blue roaster is back on the top shelf of my pantry. There is a chip in the enamel on one handle, from where I set it down too hard in the trunk that day.
I have never tried to fix it.