The Turkey Dad Carved One More Time

The young man took over on the second bird with Dad watching from the wheelchair. Every few slices Dad would say “Pull,” or “Slow,” and the boy would nod and do it. By the end of that bird, his slices were coming out right.

“Good,” Dad said, finally, and the young man grinned like he had won a ribbon at the county fair.

Velda had saved him a place at the head table, by the windows. That is the table where the priest sits, and the ladies from the kitchen when they finally get to eat, and whoever has been coming to that dinner the longest.

I rolled him over there and took off the chair’s footrest so his knees fit under the table. Velda brought him a plate herself.

White meat, the first slices off his own bird, with mashed potatoes and gravy and a spoon of cranberry on the side.

I cut his turkey small for him, the way Jadwiga said. He watched me do it, and then he took the fork out of my hand and cut it smaller.

“Too big,” he said.

“Yes, Dad,” I said, and the whole table laughed.

I gave him his pill with his first bite of potatoes, out of Jadwiga’s little envelope. He ate every bit of that plate. He ate a roll with butter on it.

He had a cup of coffee with two sugars, which the nursing home will not let him have, and I decided not to tell anybody.

People kept coming by. The old men from the rail crew. A woman who had been his customer at the market for twenty years and still remembered that he cut her chops an inch thick. A man who said, “You carved at my mother’s funeral lunch in 1988, Stan. I never forgot it.”

It was about ten to one when the side door opened again.

I saw her before she saw us. Bernadette came in through the kitchen end in her winter coat with her purse over her shoulder and an empty foil pan in her hand, the kind with the cardboard lid.

She was coming to get him a plate to take back to the home. She did it every year since March, for every holiday.

She stopped just inside the door, the way you do when you walk into a room and it’s brighter than you expected. She was looking for Velda, I think, to ask for the plate.

Then she looked down the room, along the long tables with their paper cloths, to the head table by the windows. And she saw him.

I watched my sister’s face, and I am going to tell you exactly what was on it, because I promised myself I would tell this straight.

It was not anger. I had thought it might be. It was something closer to what a person looks like when they open a door they’ve opened a hundred times and the room behind it is somebody else’s.

Dad was sitting up straight in his chair in his brown cardigan with his hair combed back and a cup of coffee in his good hand, and there were three people standing around him talking. He was laughing. He was really laughing.

Bernadette stood there holding that empty foil pan. Half the hall knew her, because she works the deli counter at the grocery and everybody in Pulaski buys their lunch meat from her. People saw her and nodded, and a few said hello.