Twelve Turkeys for Mom’s Widows

Three Saturdays

The next Saturday morning, a little after nine, Wayne’s truck pulled into my driveway. I was out front raking leaves.

He got out and walked up to me with an envelope in his hand, a church offering envelope.

“That’s a hundred,” he said, holding it out. “I’ll have the rest. It might take me a couple more weeks.”

“Wayne, it was two eighty-seven,” I said.

“I know what it was,” he said. “Maxine told me. I’ll have it.”

I took the envelope. I did not open it in front of him. We stood there in the yard a minute, brother and sister, with the rake between us and the leaves blowing across the driveway.

“Why didn’t you just tell Mama you couldn’t do it this year?” I asked him. “She would have understood. She would have given you the money for the truck note, probably, if you’d asked.”

He looked at the ground. “That’s why,” he said. “Because she would have. And I’m fifty-nine years old, Ronda. I didn’t want to be the one asking.”

I understood that better than I wanted to. I did not say so. I just said, “All right,” and he nodded and got back in his truck.

He came back the next Saturday with another hundred, and the Saturday after that with eighty-seven dollars in the same envelope. On the front of that last one, in his blocky handwriting, he had written “Turkeys.”

Next November

I would like to tell you everything was fixed after that, but families do not work that way.

Wayne was quiet around Mom for a good while. He came over more, though. He fixed her storm door and cleaned her gutters without being asked.

Lettie kept her distance from him through Christmas, and then one Sunday in January she let him walk her to her car after church, and after that things were mostly back the way they had been.

The next fall, on the first Sunday in November, Mom went to her coffee can to count out the turkey money, and Wayne put his hand over hers and said, “Not this year, Mama. This year it’s mine.”

She looked at him a long moment. Then she put the money back in the can.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Wayne came to Mom’s at nine in the morning with twelve frozen turkeys in the bed of his truck.

He had bought them himself, with his own money, at the grocery store. Cash was riding with him, eleven now and proud of it.

I followed in my truck, just to be there. Mom wore her mustard cardigan. The trees were bare again, and the sun was bright and low across the brick houses.

Wayne lifted every bird out of the truck himself. Cash carried them up the walks.

And Mom went up every step with her hand on her son’s arm, and at every door she kissed a widow on the cheek and called her by her maiden name.

At the fifth door, the lady who had lost her husband the spring before had her children’s cars in the driveway already, home early. She hugged Wayne before she hugged Mom.

At the last brick house, Lettie was waiting in the open door.

She took her turkey from Mom’s hands, and then she reached out and patted Wayne on the cheek, once, the way you would a boy.

On the drive home, Mom sat in the passenger seat of Wayne’s truck with her pocketbook in her lap, and through his back window I watched her lift her hands.

Twelve doors, twelve birds, and Mom counted them on her fingers.