The Turkey I Carried Out to My Car
Then nothing. Not that week, and not the next. She was not at church the first two Sundays of December, and Bev said she had not been to her quilting circle either. I will not pretend I did not lie awake over it. She is my mother. She is sixty-eight years old and lives by herself eleven miles out of town, and I had walked out of her house with her Thanksgiving turkey in front of the whole family. Some nights I was sure I had done the right thing. Some nights I mostly wished there had been some other right thing to do.
But every evening at supper I watched my son fill his plate without looking over his shoulder first, and that settled it for me again.
The phone rang on a Friday evening, the nineteenth of December.
“I’d like to come by tomorrow,” my mother said. No hello. “If that’s all right.”
“What for, Mom?”
There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear her kitchen clock.
“To talk to Noah. If he’ll let me.”
I told her I would ask him, and I did. I sat on the edge of his bed and said Grandma wanted to come and tell him something, and he did not have to see her if he did not want to, and nobody would be mad either way.
He thought about it a good while.
“Will you be there?”
“Right there. The whole time.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then okay.”
She came at two o’clock on Saturday in her tan Buick. She had on her church coat. She had nothing in her hands, no pie, no present, and for my mother to walk into a house with empty hands told me more than anything she could have carried.
I had a pot of chili on. Matt was at the stove. Noah was sitting on the couch with his feet not quite reaching the floor.
My mother did not sit down right away. She stood on the rug inside my front door and said, “Noah, may I sit by you?”
He scooted over.
She sat. She held her pocketbook on her knees with both hands. I had never in my life seen my mother not know how to start.
“When I was a girl your age,” she said, “my mother weighed me every Saturday night. She wrote the number on the calendar that hung by the kitchen door, in pencil, where anybody who came in the house could read it. If the number went up, I did not get dessert that week. If I asked for more at supper she would say, Gloria, you are too heavy for seconds.”
Noah’s head came up.
“Those very words,” my mother said. “I hated her for it. I was hungry and ashamed every day until I was grown, and I swore I’d never be like her. And then I looked at you, and you’re built just like I was, and I got scared for you. And the only way I ever learned to be scared for somebody was to be mean to them.”
Her voice broke on that. She stopped and got it back.
“What I said to you on Thanksgiving was wrong. What I did with your plate was wrong. It was not the truth and it was not love, whatever I called it. Your mother told me twice to stop and I gave her my word and I broke it. I am ashamed of myself. I am sorry, Noah. I am as sorry as I know how to be.”