The Turkey Dad Carved One More Time

I hooked the front straps and pulled them forward and out, and the back straps back and out, and I checked the back left one twice for a twist.

Then I put the lap belt over his hips and the shoulder belt across his chest, and I gave the chair a bump with my hip. It did not move an inch.

We drove through Pulaski slow. The streets were quiet, everybody already inside with their families or already at the hall.

We passed the old market on Main, and he turned his head and watched it go by until he could not see it anymore.

“Forty one years,” he said.

“I know, Dad,” I said.

The parish hall sits behind the church, a long low brick building with tall windows down both sides.

When we pulled into the lot at twenty past twelve, it was already full of pickups and minivans, and I had to park on the grass at the end.

My husband was there, leaning on the tailgate of his truck in his county coat. The snow had not amounted to enough to plow. He came over before I even had the ramp down.

“Stan,” he said, and he shook my father’s right hand.

“Plow guy,” Dad said, and they both laughed.

My husband unhooked the straps for me without being asked, every one, while I got the knife box. Then he walked behind us across the lot, carrying the box like it was the Host.

There is a side door to the hall that opens right into the kitchen end, and Velda was standing in it in her white apron with her gray hair up in a bun. She had been watching for us out the window.

She did not say hello. She just came down the two steps and bent over and kissed my father on the forehead, and then she straightened up and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron.

“You’re late, Stanislaus,” she said. “I’ve had two birds sitting under foil for twenty minutes. The line’s out to the coat rack.”

“Traffic,” Dad said, and she laughed so hard she had to put her hand on the door frame.

There was a ramp around the front, so we went that way, and when I pushed him through the big double doors, the noise in that hall dropped off like somebody had turned a radio down.

The long tables were set with white paper tablecloths, the kind that come on a roll, and stacks of plain white plates at every end.

The windows on both sides were full of sun off the snow. It was so bright in there you almost squinted.

Farm couples in their church clothes. The widow ladies who always sit together at the table by the piano.

Somebody at the first table said, “Is that Stan?” and somebody else said, “That’s Stan,” and then a man I went to high school with stood up and started clapping.

It went down the tables like a wave. Not loud, and not for long.

Just people clapping, the way they do for a soldier walking into church on Memorial weekend. Dad lifted his right hand an inch off the armrest, and that was all.

Velda had set it up just like she said. At the end of the serving table, where he had stood for thirty years, she had moved the chafing dishes down and left a gap the width of a wheelchair.

There was a big oval platter there, and on it, a whole turkey, golden brown.