The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
My mother stood in the kitchen doorway with the dish towel in her hands.
“You put that back. That is this family’s Thanksgiving dinner.”
“It is, Mom. That’s why I’m inviting them.”
“You are going to walk out of my house with the turkey. On Thanksgiving. In front of everyone.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Noah was at the front door with his coat zipped to his chin and the pecan pie held out level in both hands like it might go off. He was looking at the floor.
I walked down the length of that table. Past Jeff and Kim and their three kids. Past Aunt Bev and Uncle Ron. Past my cousins Lisa and Scott and their families, past Dana and her boyfriend, past Mom’s cousin Donna and her husband Larry.
Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. I could hear the clock on the mantel.
I am not going to tell you that did not hurt. It hurt about as much as anything has. I got all the way to the door with twenty-some pounds of roaster in my arms, and I thought, well, there it is, Jessica. It’s going to be you and Noah and half a turkey at the kitchen table, and that will have to be all right.
I said, “Get the door for me, bud.”
Behind me, a chair scraped back.
It was Uncle Ed.
Ed is my mother’s older brother. He is seventy-four. He drove a feed truck for the MFA for thirty-eight years and he has a bad knee and a hearing aid he turns down when my mother gets going. He is not a man who makes speeches. I do not believe I had heard him say ten words in a row since Aunt Shirley’s funeral.
He got up slow, with one hand on the table.
“Gloria,” he said. “I was a heavy boy.”
My mother’s face did something I had never seen it do.
“You remember,” Ed said. “You were there. You remember what Mama did about it. The husky pants from Penney’s, and her telling the clerk so the whole store could hear. Sending me away from the table. I was nine, ten years old. I’d go out to the barn and eat field corn out of the crib, I was that hungry.”
“Ed, this is not the time.”
“It was sixty-five years ago and I can still tell you what was on the plate she took.” He folded his napkin and laid it by his fork. “I wouldn’t wish that on a dog. And you just did it to that boy in front of all of us, and I sat here and let you, same as everybody.”
He bent down and picked up the folding chair he had been sitting on. They were his chairs. He hauls four of them out to the farm in the bed of his pickup every year because my mother never has enough.
He folded it flat and put it under his arm.
“I believe I’ll go eat with Noah,” he said.
He came down the length of the table with that chair, and when he got to my son he put his big hand on top of Noah’s head, just rested it there a second, the way you would steady yourself on a fence post.
“You mash those potatoes, son?”
Noah nodded. He could not talk.
“Best I ever had. I’d have gone back for more myself. Come on, I’ll get the door.”