Twelve Turkeys for Mom’s Widows

Twelve Birds in a Buggy

The frozen turkeys were in the big open case at the back of the store, stacked like cordwood in their plastic and their red mesh carrying bags.

A sign hung over the case with the price per pound.

Cash and I went through them one at a time looking for the right size. Mom had always bought them between twelve and sixteen pounds. “Big enough for family,” she said, “small enough to lift.”

A young man in a grocery store apron came over while I was wrestling the eighth one into the buggy.

He asked if we were feeding an army. Cash told him we were feeding twelve widows, and the young man stopped smiling and helped us load the rest.

He even went in the back and found a second buggy so the birds would not roll off the top.

He did not say anything about it. He just did it, and pushed it to the register himself.

At the register the total came to two hundred eighty-seven dollars and some cents.

I put it on my debit card, the one tied to the Christmas account, and I did not look at Mom while I did it.

I felt her hand on my arm anyway. She did not say thank you. She did not have to.

She patted my arm twice, the way she used to when I was small and had done something right.

The young man and Cash loaded every bird into the bed of my truck, lined up two deep across the back by the tailgate. Cash counted them out loud as they went in. “Ten. Eleven. Twelve.”

Then we climbed back in and pulled out of the lot. Mom held her pocketbook on her lap the whole way.

About halfway to her street, she started humming “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” low and steady, the way she does in church when she does not need the hymnal.

That was how I knew she was going to be all right. Mom only hums when her mind is settled.

The First Door

Mom’s street is short and straight, a dozen brick houses on each side, most of them with carports and chain-link fences and a concrete walk running up to a little front stoop.

The oaks and the sweetgums had dropped nearly everything by then. The yards were brown and gold with leaves, and the bare branches made long thin shadows across the street in that low November sun.

I parked at the curb in front of the first house on the list and let the tailgate down.

Mom took off her seatbelt and said, “I’m doing the handing. You do the driving and the lifting.”

“Mama, there’s twelve front steps,” I said.

“I know how many steps there are, Ronda,” she said. “I’ve been up every one of them.”

The first lady on the list is 91, the oldest on the street.

She worked at the mill with Mom, on the looms, back when they were both young, and her husband was a fireman who passed nearly thirty years ago.

Cash lifted the first bird out of the truck bed by its mesh handle and carried it up the walk with his free hand out for balance.

He went up the walk ahead of Mom, very serious.

Mom went up the step slow, one foot and then the other. When the door opened, Cash handed the turkey to Mom, and Mom held it up in both hands toward the lady in the doorway.

And then my mother leaned in and kissed that old woman on the cheek and called her by her maiden name.

The name she had carried in the tenth grade, before she married. The name nobody had said out loud in sixty years.

The lady laughed out loud. She put her hand over her mouth like a girl and laughed. “Eudora Pickens,” she said. “Nobody’s called me that since the Truman administration.”

“Well, it’s still your name,” Mom said. “Happy Thanksgiving, honey. Get that in your icebox.”