Chapter 1 - The Turkey
The turkey hit me before I could get out of my chair.
The platter caught my chest, tipped, and shattered against the floor. Gravy soaked through the blue blouse I had ironed that morning. Stuffing slid into my lap.
Across the table, my son stood with his arm still extended.
“Go back to the nursing home, you useless old woman!”
For one second, nobody moved.
My grandchildren, Lily and Max, stared at their father. Jennifer, his wife, pressed her napkin to her mouth.
I knew that look. She was hiding a smile.
I was sixty-five. I had taught elementary school for thirty-four years, buried my husband five years earlier, and spent three days making Thanksgiving dinner in the house Robert and I had restored together.
Stuart had spent twenty minutes asking when I planned to sell it.
“I don’t,” I had told him. “I live here.”
Jennifer said the house was too much work for a woman my age.
Stuart said I was getting forgetful.
Then he said, “Dad would want you somewhere safe.”
That was when I told him to stop using his father’s name to make his point.
He threw the platter.
I looked at the broken pieces on the floor. My mother had given us that china when Robert and I married.
“Grandma?” Lily whispered.
“I’m all right, sweetheart.”
I went upstairs and changed. In the bathroom mirror, I found gravy on my neck and one white feather from the turkey stuck to my sleeve.
I pulled it off and waited to cry.
Nothing came.
When I returned, Stuart had poured himself more wine. Jennifer was looking at her phone. Max had started picking up pieces of china with his bare hands.
“Leave that, honey,” I told him. “You’ll cut yourself.”
Stuart looked away.
I sat down at the head of my table.
“Who wants pie?”
Later, after they had gone, I found a folded sheet of paper beneath Stuart’s chair. It was a printout for Cedar Grove Senior Living.
May you like
Across the top, someone had written my name.
Beneath it was a date for an appointment I had never made.
