Five Plates and a Folding Chair

He called again Tuesday night, which he never does. Dad is a Sunday phone call man. He asked how work was.

He asked if I had enough chairs. He asked what size bird I was getting. Then he went quiet again.

“You doing okay, kiddo?” he said.

“I’m fine, Dad.”

He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

I want to be fair to my father here, because people who hear this story always want to know where he was in all of it.

Dad is not a man who argues at the supper table. He never has been.

When I was little and my mother would start in on him, he would go out to the garage and change the oil in a car that did not need it. He picks his moments, and he picks them slow.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” And then he asked if I wanted his roaster pan, and I said I had one, and that was all.

On Wednesday I went to the Hy-Vee on Minnesota after a day shift and walked the aisles with a cart like it was a holiday.

I bought a fourteen pound turkey, a bag of potatoes, a box of stuffing, butter, celery, onions, and two cans of pumpkin.

At the checkout the woman ahead of me was buying three turkeys and a case of pop, and she looked at my one bird and said, “Small crowd this year?”

I said, “Four,” and she said, “That’s the best size,” and I decided she was right.

That night I brined the turkey in a cooler on my little balcony, because it was twenty-six degrees out and my refrigerator is the size of a filing cabinet.

I lay awake listening to the wind come down Minnesota Avenue and thought about gravy.

My grandma June taught me to make gravy. Dad’s mother.

She lived out by Hartford on an acreage, and every Thanksgiving until I was sixteen we went to her house, and I stood on a step stool at her stove while she talked me through it.

“Don’t you rush it,” she would say. “Gravy can tell when you’re in a hurry. Flour in the fat, and you stir with a fork until it smells like toast. Then the broth a little at a time. You can always add. You can’t take away.”

She died the winter I was sixteen. Dad made her gravy that Thanksgiving and it was lumpy and too salty, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down, and then he went out to the garage for a while. After that I made it. Every year since.

Thursday morning I was up at six. My apartment is one bedroom, a kitchen you can touch both walls of, and a living room with a window that looks out on the parking lot and a row of bare ash trees.

I pushed my little table against the living room wall, under the lamp. It seats two on a normal day and four if everybody likes each other.

I borrowed two chairs from Mr. Hanson across the hall, who is eighty and lives alone and made me promise to bring him a plate.