Twelve Turkeys for Mom’s Widows

“My hours got cut, Ronda. I needed it.” My brother said it the way a man tells you the weather, flat and a little bored, like I had called to ask him something silly.

I was sitting at my desk in the county office in Laurens on a Friday at lunch, a pimento cheese sandwich half unwrapped in front of me, and I set it down.

“Needed what, Wayne?” I asked, though I already knew. Mom had called me twenty minutes before, and her voice had that careful sound it gets when she does not want to be a bother to anybody.

“The turkey money,” he said. “Mom’s three hundred. I used it on the truck note and the power bill. They cut me to thirty-two hours at the plant back in September, and I’ve been behind ever since.”

I let that sit a second. I knew about his hours. Everybody in the family knew. Maxine had told me in the church parking lot, back in October, with her arms crossed against the wind.

“So when were you going to buy the birds?” I said. “It’s the Friday before the week of Thanksgiving. Those ladies are counting on them.”

Wayne laughed. It was not a mean laugh, exactly, which somehow made it worse. It was the laugh of a man who had already decided the thing was settled.

“Ronda, those old women can buy their own turkey,” he said.

“Half of them have more put back than I do. And Mom will never know. She can’t see the street from her chair anymore. She’ll think I set them on the porches like always.”

I did not say anything for a long time. Somebody down the hall was running the copier, and I listened to it go back and forth, back and forth, the way you listen to rain.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later, Wayne.” And I hung up the phone before I said something I would have had to pray about all weekend.

Twenty Novembers

You have to understand what those turkeys were. They were not a charity drive, and they were not a church project, though the church folks knew about them. They were just my mother’s.

Mom is Eudora Pickens. She is 82 years old. She sewed for a living for forty-one years, first at the mill and then out of her own front room, hemming slacks and letting out wedding dresses for half of Laurens County.

My daddy died twenty years ago, in the spring. That first November without him, Mom sat at her kitchen table and made a list of every widow on her street. There were nine that year.

She bought each of them a turkey with the money she had put back from her sewing, and she carried them door to door herself in the trunk of her old Buick, one at a time, in the daylight.

When I asked her why, she said, “Because the first Thanksgiving alone, you don’t want to cook. And if somebody hands you a bird, you have to.” That was all the explanation she ever gave.