Twelve Turkeys for Mom’s Widows

Every One of Them

I had not known that Mom did that. Twenty years of turkeys, and I had never once gone along.

I had always been at work, or busy, or I just figured it was her thing and she liked doing it alone.

She did it at every single door. Every one. She knew every maiden name on that street.

She knew which ones had grown up in Laurens and which had come from Greenwood or Newberry, and she knew whose daddy had run the feed store.

At the second house lived a retired schoolteacher who had taught half the county to diagram sentences.

She held the turkey and said, “Eudora, I wondered if you’d forgotten us this year.” Mom said, “Not in this life.”

At the third house, a lady with a walker could not hold the bird and the walker both, so Cash carried it inside for her and set it on her kitchen counter and came back out with a peppermint in his mouth.

At the fourth house, the lady asked Mom if she had been feeling poorly, since the turkeys were late. She said it kindly, with her hand on Mom’s sleeve.

“I’m fine, sugar,” Mom said. “The turkeys just took the long way this year.”

I stood at the tailgate and listened to her say that, and I understood that she was not going to say Wayne’s name. Not at that door, and not at any door after.

She could have. Everybody on that street knew Wayne. Half of them had watched him play Little League. She could have said one sentence and the whole street would have known by suppertime. She did not.

The Fifth Door and the Sixth

The fifth lady had lost her husband in March. It was going to be her first Thanksgiving alone.

Mom had added her to the list in the spring, in pencil, and then gone back over it in ink in October.

She opened the door before Mom got to the top of the step.

She was younger than the rest, maybe seventy, and she had on house shoes and a cardigan that was too big for her, and I knew without being told that it had been his.

Mom handed her the bird and kissed her cheek and called her by her maiden name, same as the others, and the lady just stood there holding that frozen turkey against her chest.

“I wasn’t going to cook,” she said. “I told my kids not to bother coming. I wasn’t going to do any of it this year.”

“I know, honey,” Mom said. “That’s what the turkey’s for. You can’t let it go to waste. Call your kids.”

The lady nodded. She did not cry, and Mom did not either.

They just stood there a second, two widows on a front step, and then Mom patted her arm twice and came back down to the truck.

When she got in the cab to rest a minute, she said, “That’s why, Ronda. That one right there is why.” And that was all she said about it.

The sixth house was a lady who never came to the door at all, because she was stone deaf and her daughter lived with her.

The daughter took the bird and hugged Mom and said her mother would want to know who brought it.

“Tell her it was Eudora,” Mom said, “and that I said she still owes me a pound cake from 1987.” The daughter laughed and said she would.