The Four Lids on My Counter

I want to tell you what that Thanksgiving cost, because I think it matters for what I did next.

I am a pharmacy tech at a drugstore in Jasper, and Neil drives a bulk feed truck for a mill out of Huntingburg.

We do fine. We do not do so fine that $310 at the Kroger is nothing.

That was what the receipt said on Tuesday night, and I folded it up and put it in my purse so Neil would not see it and worry.

A twenty-two pound turkey and a roasting hen. Ten pounds of potatoes. Two bags of egg noodles and a chuck roast for the beef and noodles.

Bread for the dressing, celery, onions, three pounds of butter, and the pecans, which are robbery.

Two days of cooking. Wednesday night I made the pies and the persimmon pudding, and Thursday I was up at five with the turkey.

My feet hurt in a way that went all the way up into my back.

Fourteen people were in my house. Neil and me and Jonah. Neil’s mother, Bernadine. His sister Renee and her husband Doug, with their three, Ethan, Lily and Grace.

My brother Tim and his wife Erin had driven over from Washington, up in Daviess County, with their baby, Rose, who was just a year old. And Bernadine’s brother Frank and his wife Marie had come over from Ferdinand.

We have one dining table that seats eight if nobody minds elbows.

The plan, my plan, was that the kids would eat at the old card table we keep in the garage, set up right off the dining room.

The kids would get their plates first, because kids are hungry and kids spill and kids are done in ten minutes and off to the basement to play.

Then the grownups would go through. That was how my mother always did it.

Neil had gone out to the garage to get that card table out from behind the riding mower. That was where he was.

It is important to me that you know that, because people always want to know where the husband was.

He was not hiding. He was not watching. He was in the garage wrestling a folding table out from behind a lawn mower so his son would have somewhere to sit.

And while he was out there, his mother had gone through the line first, before the children and before anybody had said grace, and packed herself four containers of my Thanksgiving to take home.

I stood there with the rolls. Everybody else had already found a chair at the big table.

Renee was buckling Rose’s high chair strap for Erin. Doug was pouring tea. Frank was telling Tim about a deer.

Nobody had seen it but me and Jonah. That is how fast it happened.

People have asked me since why I did not just say something.