The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
I stopped carving.
“She never told me that.”
“She wouldn’t. She’d rather have her teeth pulled.” He looked into the front room, where Noah was showing Lisa’s Katie how to fold a paper napkin into a boat. “It doesn’t excuse her. I’m just telling you where it comes from. It comes from someplace.”
When the food was on, we all crowded into the front room and stood behind whatever we were going to sit on, and there was that pause where everybody waits for somebody to pray. At the farm it was always my dad, and then after Dad it was Jeff.
Ed said, “Noah. Would you say grace for us?”
Noah looked at me. I nodded.
He folded his hands and shut his eyes tight, the way they teach them in Sunday school.
“Dear God. Thank you for this food and for the turkey and for Mom getting up so early. Thank you for everybody who came to our house, and for Uncle Ed’s chairs. Please be with Dad at work and keep him safe by the furnace. And please be with Grandma, and let her have enough to eat at her house, and let her not be sad. Amen.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
Ed took his handkerchief out and blew his nose like a truck horn, and said, “Well. Pass that boy the potatoes,” and everybody laughed, and we sat down.
Noah ate his plate. When it was empty he sat there looking at it, and I watched him not ask. I watched my son, in his own house, at his own table, not ask.
Ed reached across, picked up Noah’s plate, and carried it into the kitchen. He came back with a slice of turkey, a spoon of potatoes and a roll. He set it down in front of Noah and sat back down and went on with what he was telling Mike about a combine.
That was all. He did not make a thing of it.
Noah ate every bite.
Matt got home at twenty-five after six, still in his work boots, to find six vehicles along our curb and a man he barely knew asleep in his recliner.
I met him on the porch and told him. All of it, start to finish, in about two minutes.
I have been married to that man for twelve years and I have seen him angry maybe four times. He does not get loud. He gets very still. He stood on our porch in the cold with his lunch cooler in his hand and did not say one word until I was through.
Then he said, “Where is he?”
Noah was on the floor in the front room with the little kids, building something out of the napkin boats. Matt went straight to him, got down on one knee in his dirty work pants, and picked that boy up off the floor like he weighed nothing. Noah is nine and getting too old to be carried, and he wrapped his legs around his dad anyway.
“I heard you made the potatoes,” Matt said.
“Both times. The second ones were from a box.”
“I heard you said grace too.”
“Uncle Ed asked me.”
“Well, I am starving, and I’m told there’s a plate. You want to sit with me while I eat? I don’t like to eat by myself.”