Twelve Turkeys for Mom’s Widows

The list grew and shrank over the years. Ladies moved in with their children, and ladies passed on, and new ones lost their husbands and got added in Mom’s careful hand. For a long stretch it settled at twelve.

Twelve widows on one short street of brick houses, most of them built in the fifties when the mill was running three shifts. Twelve birds every November. Twenty Novembers in a row.

Three years ago, Mom had a fender bender at the four-way stop by the post office.

Nobody was hurt, but it scared her badly, and she handed me her car keys that same afternoon and never asked for them back.

That was when Wayne stepped in. He offered, and I want to be fair about that.

He came over that October and said, “Mama, let me do the turkeys. You give me the money and the list, and I’ll get them around.”

So for three years she did. Every November she counted three hundred dollars out of her coffee can, folded it into a church offering envelope, wrote “Turkeys” on the front, and gave it to her son along with a typed copy of the list.

And for two of those years he did it. He bought the birds at the grocery store and set them on the porches, and the ladies called Mom to thank her, and Mom sat in her chair by the window and smiled.

This year he took the envelope on the first Sunday in November. And then he did nothing at all.

The Thing About a Frozen Turkey

I sat at my desk after that phone call and looked at my sandwich and thought about driving straight over to Wayne’s house after work and having it out with him in his front yard.

I thought about calling Maxine, his wife, who I was nearly certain did not know. I thought about calling our pastor.

I thought about a dozen things a person thinks when her brother has done something small and ugly.

Then I thought about the turkeys. A frozen fourteen-pound bird needs three or four days in the refrigerator to thaw.

Any woman who has ever cooked a Thanksgiving dinner knows that, and every one of Mom’s widows knew it too.

If those birds were not in somebody’s icebox by Sunday, they were not getting cooked on Thursday. That was just arithmetic. The fight with Wayne could wait. The turkeys could not.

I called my husband, Royal, on his lunch break. He works at a distribution warehouse out toward Clinton, driving a forklift, and he had picked up a Saturday shift because it pays time and a half before Christmas.

“How much are we talking?” he asked, after I told him. Royal does not waste words, which is one of the reasons I married him.

“Three hundred, maybe a little less,” I said. “It would come out of the Christmas money.”

He was quiet a second. I could hear the beep of a forklift backing up behind him.

“Then it comes out of the Christmas money,” he said. “The grandbabies won’t know the difference. Those old ladies will.”

“You don’t think I ought to make Wayne do it?”

“I think you ought to do it Saturday,” Royal said, “and deal with Wayne after. A man who’ll take his mama’s turkey money isn’t going to cough it up by tomorrow morning.”

That was my husband. He would not be there Saturday, but he had made the decision easy, and that is worth more than being there sometimes.