The Turkey Dad Carved One More Time

“It was his money,” I said. “It was for him. Casimir sent his from a truck stop in Oklahoma.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you lecture me. I’m the one who goes up there every day after work. I’m the one who cuts his fingernails and sits with him when he can’t find his words. You come up once a week on Saturdays.”

“I know you do,” I said. “I know that.”

“Then you know he’s too tired,” she said, and she hung up on me.

I want to be fair to my sister, because she is not a bad woman, and nobody who reads this should think so.

She is fifty two and works the deli counter at the grocery in town, and since March she had driven to that nursing home every single afternoon.

She lived four miles from Dad and I lived forty. That was how it fell out. She was the one the nurses called when he fell, and the one who brought his clean undershirts in a laundry basket.

She was tired, and I believed her about that. But being tired did not give her the right to decide that our father’s Thanksgiving was over. He was eighty three and he had his mind. He could decide that for himself.

Arguing with her on the phone would only get me the same sentence again: you don’t see him every day.

So I stopped arguing. I sat at my desk that afternoon and made a list on the back of a parts invoice.

I should tell you about my father, so you understand why the hall dinner mattered so much to him.

Stanislaus Kowalczyk cut meat for forty one years at the market on Main Street in Pulaski.

He started there at sixteen, sweeping sawdust, and by the time he retired he could break down a side of beef faster than anybody in Brown County.

He had hands like oven mitts and he never once cut himself that I saw.

He wore a white coat and a paper hat, and he knew which lady wanted her pork chops thick and which one wanted them thin for frying.

For thirty years, every Thanksgiving, he carved the turkeys at the community dinner in the parish hall. Anybody could come.

Widowers, young couples with no family close, the men from the rail crew, people who just did not want to eat alone.

The ladies roasted the birds in the hall kitchen starting at five in the morning, and Dad stood at the end of the serving table in his white coat with his own knife. He carved every one of them.

When I was a girl, I stood beside him and handed him clean towels.

He would cut the first slice thin, so thin you could almost read through it, and he would hand it to the cook. He said the cook should always eat first.

Then the stroke came in March. It took most of his left side and some of his words.

His right hand, his knife hand, came back slow but it came back. The therapist at the home said he had a grip like a man half his age.

But he had not been out of that building since April, except once to the clinic in Green Bay for a scan.

Bernadette said moving him was too much. Maybe some days it was. That was not what I had heard in his voice on Sunday.

On my list I wrote three things. Call Velda. Call Dad. Find a van.