The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
Then my cousin Lisa stood up. Lisa is Ed’s daughter. She did not say anything at all. She just looked at her husband Mike, and Mike said “Yep,” and wiped their little girl’s hands with a napkin and stood up too. Lisa went to the sideboard and picked up the basket of rolls she had baked and brought herself.
Then Scott, and his wife Amy with the baby on her hip, and Amy’s corn casserole.
Then Dana, who is Aunt Bev’s daughter, twenty-three years old, got up without looking at her mother. Her boyfriend Tim followed her with the deviled eggs.
And then, at the very last, Jeff’s oldest. Emma. She is seventeen and has her own car. She stood up, and her mother said “Emma” in a low voice, and Emma said, “I’m going to Aunt Jess’s,” and came around the table and took the pie out of Noah’s hands so he could work the door.
I counted them later. I could not have counted anything right then.
Eleven.
My brother stayed in his chair. I will tell you about Jeff, because I do not want anybody thinking he is a coward. Jeff farms. He rents Mom’s hundred and sixty acres, and the ground he rents from her is the difference between his family making it and not. She has reminded him of that at more than one holiday. He sat there with his jaw tight and his eyes on his plate, and I knew exactly what it was costing him, and I did not hold it against him that afternoon. He held it against himself plenty.
I carried the roaster down the porch steps into a gray, bright November afternoon, with the wind coming across the bean stubble. Ed walked ahead of me and opened the trunk of my Malibu. I had an old bath towel back there. He spread it out without my asking and I set the roaster down on it and he tucked the corners up around the sides.
“That’ll ride,” he said.
I looked back once. My mother was standing in the front window with the dish towel still in her hands. Behind her I could see eight people at a very long table.
Noah did not say anything until we were out on the blacktop.
He had the pecan pie back on his lap. He kept smoothing the foil down around the edge with his thumb.
“Mom, I wasn’t even that hungry.”
That is the thing that got me. Not the plate. That. My nine-year-old trying to make it not have happened so I would not have to be upset.
“Yes, you were,” I said. “You’d been up since four-thirty and you’d been working since seven. You were hungry and you went back for a second plate at Thanksgiving, which is what Thanksgiving is for.”
He was quiet a minute. We passed the Hoffman place, the silos, the church sign.
“Am I fat?”
I pulled over. Right there on the shoulder, with four vehicles coming along behind us in a line. I saw Ed’s pickup slow down and Ed lift two fingers off the wheel and go on by, and the rest went on behind him, because they had the sense to know.
I put the car in park and turned all the way around in my seat.
“Look at me, Noah James.”
He did.