Chapter 8 - The Geography of the Table
Thanksgiving in Oklahoma is an industry.
It requires forty-eight hours of continuous food preparation, three different varieties of sweet potato casserole (one with marshmallows for the children, one with pecans for the adults, and one with artificial sweetener for my aunt Clara’s non-existent diabetes), and a fifteen-pound turkey that Arthur would smoke over hickory chunks in the backyard while drinking Miller Lite from a green koozie.
For seven years, Emma and I had been the logistics crew.
We arrived at eight in the morning on Thursday. Emma made the yeast rolls—sixty of them, kneaded by hand on Brenda’s butcher-block island—because Brenda said her wrists were too weak for yeast dough. I set up the tables: the heavy mahogany one for the "real family" in the dining room, and the rickety card table with the three good legs in the drafty corridor by the back door for the "young people."
At thirty-three, with two children and a mortgage, I had still been sitting at the card table with Leo and Harper until the previous year, because Maddie’s second husband had needed the seat next to Arthur to discuss commercial real estate.
On the Monday before Thanksgiving, a certified letter arrived at our apartment.
It was not from a lawyer.
It was from Arthur.
He had used the official stationery of the Oklahoma Natural Gas Retirees’ Association—heavy gray bond with an embossed blue flame at the top. Across the center, typed on an electric typewriter that had a defective lowercase e that sat slightly above the baseline, were four sentences:
Zane:
Your mother has informed me that you have not responded to her telephone messages regarding the holiday arrangements. We have sixteen people confirmed for dinner at one o’clock on Thursday. If you intend to take your place at the table, we expect you to arrive by nine in the morning with the rolls and the extra folding chairs from your building.
We will not discuss the events of October twenty-first. Your mother has agreed to let the matter drop for the sake of the grandchildren, provided you conduct yourself with appropriate respect for the family circle.
Your father, Arthur Mercer.
I read it twice.
Emma was sitting at the kitchen table, checking the homework sheets from Noah’s first-grade folder.
"What is it?" she asked.
I laid the gray paper on the table between Noah’s spelling test and a blue crayon drawing of an ichthyosaur.
She didn't pick it up. She read it where it lay, her eyes moving across the defective lowercase e’s with that slow, terrifying calm that I had come to rely on more than my own pulse.
"He typed it," she said.
"He always types when he wants to feel like a supervisor," I said. "He hasn't written a letter by hand since nineteen-eighty-eight."
"What are you going to do?"
I walked to the kitchen window.
Down in the courtyard of the four-plex, Noah was showing Ellie how to kick a small soccer ball against the brick foundation. The ball was old, its black-and-white pentagons worn down to the gray leather, but every time it hit the mortar with a soft, hollow thump, Noah cheered and held up his arms as if eighty thousand people were screaming from the bleachers.
"I'm going to make a turkey," I said.
Emma looked up, her gray eyes widening slightly. "A whole turkey?"
"A breast," I said. "Six pounds. From the butcher on Main Street. The one with the bone in."
"And the rolls?"
"We’ll make twelve," I told her. "Not sixty. Just twelve. Four for you, four for me, two for Noah, and two for Ellie."
On Thursday morning, the city of Norman was quiet as a cemetery.
A light, dry snow—the first of the season—was falling through the branches of the elms, melting as soon as it touched the asphalt, turning the streets into dark, shiny mirrors that reflected the gray sky.
Our apartment smelled of rosemary, browned butter, and the sharp, savory tang of garlic from the small roasting pan in our oven.
The dining table—a drop-leaf pine table we had bought for forty dollars at a garage sale and painted navy blue—was set for four.
There was no card table. There was no three-legged folding chair by the drafty door.
Noah sat at the head of the table.
He was wearing his parasaurolophus shirt again—it had been washed four times since his birthday, the green screen print beginning to show tiny white fracture lines along the crest, but he had insisted on wearing it because he said it was his "holiday armor."
Beside him sat Ellie, her booster seat strapped securely to the ladder-back chair, her plastic fork gripped in her fist like a dagger.
At one-fifteen, my cell phone buzzed on the counter.
It buzzed once. Twice. Three times.
Then came a text message from Maddie:
Everyone is here. Mom is crying in the pantry. Dad says you have thirty minutes before he carves. Are you bringing the chairs or not???
I looked at the screen.
I didn't feel the knot in my throat. I didn't feel that cold, sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach that had ruined every holiday of my adult life—that desperate, frantic desire to run to the car, to speed through the traffic, to arrive with the rolls out of breath, apologizing for being five minutes late, begging for the privilege of sitting on the three-legged chair by the garbage can.
I touched the screen with my thumb.
I selected the message.
I tapped Delete.
Then I tapped Maddie’s name at the top of the thread, scrolled down through the contact card to the red text at the bottom, and pressed:
Block this Caller.
I laid the phone facedown on the counter beside the butter dish.
"Noah," I said, sitting down at the navy-blue table and picking up the carving knife. "Dark meat or light meat?"
He looked at the six-pound breast, browned to a deep, mahogany crisp, the rosemary needles sticking to the skin like tiny pine branches.
"The part with the skin, Dad," he said. "The crunchy part."
"You got it, buddy," I told him, slicing through the meat with a clean, smooth, unhurried stroke that didn't hit a single bone.
We ate for forty-five minutes.
We didn't talk about real estate. We didn't talk about divorce mediation. We didn't talk about blood pressure or the First United Methodist Church or the three-hundred-dollar drone that Leo had probably already crashed into the neighbor's roof.
Noah told us about the ichthyosaur—how its eyes were twelve inches across so it could see giant squid in the pitch-black water at the bottom of the Cretaceous ocean, and how it gave birth to live babies in the middle of the sea without ever having to come up onto the beach to lay eggs.
"It didn't need the shore, Dad," Noah explained, waving his buttered roll toward the window where the snow was finally beginning to stick to the brick sill. "It had the whole deep water to live in. It just kept swimming."
May you like
"That's a smart creature, Noah," Emma said, reaching across the table to wipe a smear of cranberry sauce from his chin.
"Yeah," Noah said, his mouth full of dark chocolate cake from the three slices we had kept frozen since his birthday. "It didn't let anything catch it."
