The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car

That was six Thanksgivings ago, and I had done every one since.

People have asked me why I kept doing it out there, after the things she had said. Two reasons. Her dining room holds the only table in the family that will seat twenty-two, and my house will not seat six. And the winter before he died, my dad asked me to keep Thanksgiving at the farm as long as Mom was living in it. I told him I would.

This year I bought a twenty-four-pound turkey and put it in my own refrigerator the Friday before to thaw, because a bird that size takes the better part of a week. I bought ten pounds of russets, the celery and onions and sage for the dressing, three pounds of butter, the sweet potatoes, the green beans, the cranberries, the pecans and the Karo for the pies, and two bags of ice. It came to a little under two hundred dollars. I work the front desk at a veterinary clinic, and that is not money I spend without feeling it.

My husband Matt works at the plant out on the highway. They run a furnace out there that does not get shut down for a holiday, so somebody’s husband is always on the floor on Thanksgiving, and this year the rotation landed on mine. Six in the morning until six at night, double time and a half, phone in his locker until the shift is over because those are the rules on the floor. He hated to miss it. We also have a furnace of our own at home that is nineteen years old, and double time and a half is double time and a half.

So it was Noah and me.

I got him out of bed at twenty after four and he slept against the car window all the way out. I let us in Mom’s back door at five with my own key. I had the oven lit and the turkey in my big blue speckled roaster by a quarter past six. That roaster was a wedding present from Matt’s mother. It is the only thing I have ever owned that will hold a bird that size.

Noah woke up on Mom’s couch about seven and came into the kitchen in his sock feet and said, “What can I do?”

That is my son. That has been my son since he could talk. He is a big, solid, square-built boy, the same build as Matt and Matt’s dad, and he has the softest heart of anybody I know. He peeled every one of those ten pounds of potatoes standing on a step stool at his grandmother’s sink. He mashed them himself with the old wire masher because he said the mixer made them gluey. He was proud of those potatoes. He asked me twice if I thought people would be able to tell he made them.

My mother came down at eight, looked at the two of us, and said, “Well, don’t let him lick the beaters.”

I let that one go by. It was a small one, and I had the dressing to get in.

Here is what I had not let go by.