The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
So Noah sat with his dad at the kitchen table and had a piece of pecan pie while Matt ate, and I heard Matt say, not loud, “Seconds are a compliment to the cook, bud. Always have been. Anybody tells you different, you send them to me.”
Later, after the dishes, Matt shook Ed’s hand at the door and held on to it a while. Neither one of them said anything. Men like that do not need to.
About eight o’clock there was a knock, and it was my brother.
Jeff stood on my porch with his cap in his hands. He had come to see Emma got home all right, he said, which was not why he had come, because Emma had her own car.
“I sat there,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for seven hours. I sat there and looked at my plate while she did that to my nephew.”
“I know why you sat there, Jeff.”
“That’s no reason. Ground’s ground. He’s a kid.” He looked past me. “Can I talk to him?”
I let him in. He sat down on the piano bench in front of Noah and said, “Buddy, I owe you an apology. I should have stood up for you today and I didn’t, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” And he put out his hand, man to man, and Noah shook it.
Aunt Bev called around nine. I took it in the bedroom.
She told me what it had been like out there after we left. Eight people and the sides and six slices of turkey on a platter. Nobody talked. Mom ate a spoon of green beans and then got up and started washing dishes by hand and would not let anybody help her.
“I stayed because somebody had to,” Bev said. “And because I wanted to say something to her without an audience. I dried while she washed and I told her, Gloria, Mama did that very thing to you and you hated her for it until the day she died. You told me so at her funeral.”
“What did she say?”
“Not a word. But she broke a gravy boat.”
Saturday morning, Matt drove out to the farm to bring home my casserole dishes. He went by himself. He said that was how he wanted it.
He told me about it afterward. My dishes were washed and stacked on the kitchen table with dish towels between them so they would not chip. Mom had coffee on. She did not offer him any.
She said, “I suppose you’ve come to tell me what a monster I am.”
Matt said, “No, ma’am. I came for the dishes.”
He picked up the box. Then he set it back down.
“Thursday night at bedtime he asked me if he ought to quit eating supper,” Matt said. “He’s nine years old, Gloria. He wanted to know if that would fix it.”
He said my mother sat down in a kitchen chair like somebody had let the air out of her.
“I was trying to help that boy.”
“I believe you think so. I do. But here’s how it is. Our door’s open. It always will be, you’re his grandmother. But it goes through him first. Not through Jessica and not through me. You don’t come to our table until you’ve looked him in the eye and said it to him.”
“Said what?”
“You’ll know what.”
He brought the dishes home. She had sent the leftover sweet potatoes in one of them, with foil over the top. No note.