Chapter 14: Thanksgiving, Late

Mrs. Meade held Thanksgiving on the sixth of December.

She said the real one belonged to people whose families were still in one piece.

"This one's for the leftovers," she told me at the door. "The people, not the turkey."

Her house on the bluff was full by two o'clock.

Three tug captains came with their wives, and a deckhand's widow brought a pecan pie.

Bonnie's husband was six foot four and had to duck under the chandelier.

"Bon says you hit a door with my hammer," he said.

"I'm sorry about your hammer."

"Don't be. It's never done anything that interesting with me."

The turkey was enormous and a little dry.

"I've been cooking turkey for sixty years and I've never once got it right," she said. "That's what gravy is for. Hugh, carve."

Hugh carved.

I sat at his right hand again.

Nobody said a word about it, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for me in a month.

Under the table, his knee rested against mine and stayed there.

One of the captains, a man with a white beard and hands like baseball mitts, leaned across the cranberries.

"So you're the one who told her 'not yet' on the mic."

"That was me."

"My wife made it her ringtone."

His wife held up her phone and played it.

My own voice came out of it, small and tinny, and then two hundred people laughing.

The whole table cracked up.

I put my face in my napkin.

After the pie, Mrs. Meade crooked a finger at me and took me into her kitchen.

She shut the door.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on a stool by her old green stove.

She opened a drawer and took out a checkbook, the same one she'd brought to my shop in August.

"Forty-eight thousand dollars," she said. "That's the number, isn't it?"

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