Twelve Turkeys for Mom’s Widows

Arms That Would Not Quit

By the eighth door, Cash had stopped carrying the turkeys by the handle and started carrying them like sacks of feed, over one shoulder, the way he had seen Royal carry bags of mulch from the truck.

At the ninth door, I could see his arms shaking when he lifted the bird.

Fourteen pounds of frozen turkey is a lot for a ten-year-old boy, and he had already carried a hundred pounds of them up and down those walks.

“Let me get this one, baby,” I said.

“No ma’am,” he said. “I said I could carry twelve.” And he carried it, red in the face, all the way up the walk and handed it to Mom on the step.

The ninth lady saw him and said, “Is this your great-grandbaby, Eudora?”

And Mom said yes, and the lady went back in the house and came out with a five-dollar bill for him, and he looked at me to see if he could take it.

I nodded. He took it and said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and put it in his jeans pocket, and I do not think anything in the world could have made me prouder than that boy right then.

By the eleventh door, Mom was leaning on me. She did not complain, but I could feel her weight on my arm going up the step, and I could feel the cold coming up through her thin shoes.

“You want to rest, Mama? We can sit in the truck a few minutes.”

“After the twelfth,” she said. “Not before.”

The Last Brick House

The twelfth house on the list is the last one on the street, a brick ranch with green shutters and a concrete birdbath in the yard.

Lettie Shook has lived there for fifty-five years. She is 84.

She is also Wayne’s mother-in-law. My brother married her daughter, Maxine, thirty-one years ago this coming June, in the Baptist church two streets over. Lettie was on Mom’s list from the year her own husband died.

And every Thanksgiving for thirty-one years, Wayne and Maxine have brought Lettie to Mom’s house for dinner. Two widows at one table, both of them bossing the rest of us around the kitchen.

I pulled up to the curb and let the tailgate down one more time. There was one turkey left in the bed.

Cash climbed up in the back, got it by the mesh handle, and jumped down with it.

Before we got halfway up the walk, the front door opened. Lettie was standing there in a brown housecoat with her reading glasses pushed up on her head.

She had been watching for us. I could see it in her face.

Mom went up the step, slow, and Cash handed her the bird, and Mom held it up in its mesh bag with both hands, the same way she had at the other eleven doors.

Lettie did not take it right away.

She looked past Mom at me, standing on the walk in my burgundy fleece. She looked at Cash.

She looked at my truck at the curb with its tailgate down and the empty bed behind it. Then she looked back at Mom.

“Eudora,” she said. “Wayne told Maxine he bought these last weekend.”

Mom did not answer. She just kept holding out the turkey, both hands, the way she had held out every one of them that morning.

Lettie took it. She held it against her housecoat. Then she turned her head and looked straight at me.

“Ronda, honey,” she said. “Where is the money your mother gave him?”