The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
“You are built like your dad and your Grandpa Dale. You are strong and you are solid and you are going to be a big man, and there is nothing wrong with one inch of you. What Grandma did was wrong. It was not a little bit wrong. It was all the way wrong, and it was about her and not about you. Do you hear me?”
“Uncle Ed said he was a heavy boy.”
“He did.”
“He’s just regular now. He’s just Uncle Ed.”
“That’s exactly right.”
He thought about that. Then his chin went, and he cried the way he had been holding off crying since the kitchen, with the pie sliding on his knees, and I got my seat belt off and got hold of him across the console and held on. I got pecan pie foil in my hair. I did not care.
When he was done he wiped his face on his coat sleeve and said, “Is everybody really coming to our house?”
“Looks like it.”
“Mom. We only have four chairs.”
I laughed. I could not help it. “Then it’s a good thing Uncle Ed brought his.”
We live in a two-bedroom house on the east side of Sedalia with a kitchen table that seats four if nobody leans back. By the time I pulled in, Ed already had three folding chairs out of his truck bed and was standing in my yard holding them like a man waiting on a bus.
Lisa lives six blocks from me. She stopped at her house and came back with a card table and a plastic tablecloth with poinsettias on it. Scott had another card table in his trunk left over from his kids’ lemonade stand. Mike went next door and borrowed two lawn chairs from Mr. Wallace, who is eighty-one and came over himself ten minutes later to see what was going on and stayed for pie.
So we had my kitchen table, two card tables end to end in the front room, a piano bench, and a cooler with a cushion on it for Tim.
I looked in my pantry. I had a box of instant potatoes, three cans of green beans, a can of cranberry sauce, and two packets of turkey gravy mix. I held up the potato box and looked at Noah.
“I know they’re not yours,” I said.
He took the box and read the back of it very seriously. “I can fix these up,” he said. “They need more butter than it says.”
He and Emma did the potatoes. Dana opened beans. Amy put her corn casserole in my oven to warm. I carved the rest of that turkey at my own counter with my own knife, and I want you to know there was a great plenty. I had bought a twenty-four-pound bird for twenty-two people, and I had thirteen.
Ed stood at my elbow the whole time I carved, the way my dad used to, stealing the little pieces.
“I should have got up sooner,” he said, low. “I should have got up before the fork ever hit the plate. I want you to know I know that.”
“You got up, Uncle Ed.”
“I got up second. You were first.” He ate a piece of skin. “Your mother got it worse than I did, you know. Boys can go throw hay bales and nobody looks at them twice. Mama put Gloria on the bathroom scale every Saturday night after her bath and wrote the number on the kitchen calendar. Where the hired man could read it. Where the egg lady could read it. Ten years she did that.”