Chapter 10 - The Following November
The kitchen on East York smelled of butter, sage, and roasting pork.
It was three o'clock on Thanksgiving Thursday, twelve months later.
The table in our dining room was set for six: two floral Corelle plates from my mother’s apartment, three white ceramic plates from our daily set, and one small plastic plate with a picture of a blue steam engine for Theo.
There were no silver napkin rings. There were no linen napkins with embroidered monograms. In the center of the table sat a glass jar filled with yellow mums Theo had picked from the garden that morning, and a large, steaming ceramic dish of roasted pork chops with caramelized apples and onions that Mr. Costa had wrapped in brown paper two days earlier.
My mother sat at the head of the table, wearing her teal cardigan, showing Theo how to fold a paper napkin into the shape of a sailboat.
Across from them, Sandra from apartment 4B was already buttering a warm roll, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose as she inspected a jar of homemade cranberry relish Graham had made from scratch on Wednesday night.
The front door clicked open.
Graham walked into the hall carrying two large bags of groceries from the bakery on Danforth—three loaves of sourdough and an apple pie that smelled of cinnamon and hot sugar. He took off his boots, lined them up neatly in the rubber tray, and hung his coat on the hook beside mine.
He didn't look like a man who had been managed.
He looked like a man who lived here.
His phone buzzed on the entryway table.
He glanced at the screen as he walked past. I saw the caller ID from where I was standing by the stove with the gravy whisk: Brenda Hendrick.
He didn't tense up. He didn't look at me with that old, frantic expression of a man caught between two firing squads.
He reached down, flipped the phone over so the screen faced the wood, and walked into the dining room with the warm pie in his hands.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Nana,” he said, leaning down to kiss my mother on the cheek before setting the pie on the sideboard.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Graham,” my mother said, patting his arm with her flour-dusted hand. “Did you bring the hard cider Sandra likes?”
“Two bottles in the fridge,” he said, winking at Sandra, who gave an appreciative nod over her buttered roll.
Theo jumped up from his chair, holding his paper sailboat over his head with both hands.
“Daddy! Look! Nana made a boat! We’re going to sail it in the gravy!”
“Not in the gravy, buddy,” Graham laughed, scooping Theo up into his arms and swinging him around until the boy’s heels kicked the air. “The gravy’s for the potatoes.”
I turned off the flame beneath the saucepan, poured the thick, brown gravy into an old ceramic pitcher with a chipped spout, and carried it to the table.
The room was warm, smelling of roasted meat, hot bread, and the steam rising from four different pots on the counter. Outside, the November sleet tapped against the dining room window, cold and gray, but inside, the light from the overhead lamp fell across the plates, the food, and the five people sitting together without a single word of correction.
Nobody asked about the crust.
May you like
Nobody checked the clock.
And when Graham sat down in the chair beside me, reached under the table, and took my hand in his calloused fingers, the weight of the twenty-two-pound turkey was finally gone.
