Chapter 3 - The Phone Call on the Balcony
The wind off the street smelled of exhaust and salt by four o'clock.
I stood on my mother’s small concrete balcony on the eighth floor, leaning my forearms against the cold metal railing, watching the traffic crawl south along the Allen Road. Below, families were getting into minivans, carrying foil-wrapped casseroles and pie carriers, their coats zipped up to their chins against the dusk.
My phone vibrated again.
This time, the screen showed Graham’s name. I had let four calls go to voicemail. I had ignored two texts from Renee that simply read You are being completely childish and Call Mom right now.
I swiped the green bar and brought the phone to my ear.
“Where are you?” Graham didn't say hello. His voice had lost the measured, courtroom calm he’d used in the kitchen; it sounded thin, strained, and raw around the edges.
“I’m at my mother’s,” I said.
“You took the turkey, Margo.”
“I know.”
“You literally took the entire main course out of the house forty minutes before dinner.” A pause, filled with the muffled sound of Walter shouting something about carving knives in the background. “Do you have any idea what it looked like in that kitchen after you drove off? Renee had to go to the grocery store on Bayview to see if they had any pre-cooked ham left. On Thanksgiving.”
“Did they?” I asked.
“Margo, this isn't funny!” He was pacing; I could hear the rhythmic creak of the floorboards in his childhood bedroom. He always went up there when he had to have a fight he didn't want his parents to hear. “My parents are seventy years old. My sister drove in from Ottawa last night. We had twelve people sitting in the living room expecting dinner, and you packed up the food like a petulant teenager because my mother made one offhand remark about the skin.”
“She didn't make a remark about the skin, Graham,” I said, watching an ambulance weave through the traffic below, its red lights flashing silent against the gray apartment blocks. “She sighed, looked at something I spent five hours cooking, and told the room it would ‘do.’ Just like she told me my tourtière tasted like cardboard two years ago. Just like she told me my hair looked better when I didn't work thirty hours a week.”
“She’s old, Margo! She’s from a different generation!”
“My mother is seventy-two,” I said. “She’s sitting inside eating that turkey right now with her neighbor, and she hasn't found a single thing wrong with it.”
“Because she’s your mother!”
“No,” I said, the cold from the railing seeping through the sleeves of my coat. “Because she’s a decent person who knows how to say thank you when someone carries twenty pounds of meat into her house.”
Silence hung between us, heavy and cold.
“You left me there,” he said. The anger was fading now, replaced by that sullen, bewildered tone he used whenever his family’s machinery failed to run smoothly. “You walked out the door and left me standing in the kitchen with a bottle of wine in my hand. What was I supposed to tell my father?”
“You were supposed to tell him that your wife wasn't going to be treated like an incompetent caterer,” I said. “And then you were supposed to put the wine down and walk out behind me.”
“I couldn't just abandon my parents on Thanksgiving!”
“You abandoned me every Thanksgiving for seven years, Graham,” I said. “You just didn't notice because you were sitting at the table.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear before he could answer. I didn't hang up immediately; I held it out at arm’s length, listening to the tiny, tinny squawk of his voice coming through the earpiece, calling my name twice before I tapped the red circle and slid the phone back into my pocket.
When I stepped back inside, Sandra was wrapping three thick slices of breast meat in aluminum foil to take down to her sister on the third floor.
“Leave the bone,” Sandra instructed my mother, pointing a bent finger at the carcass. “Tomorrow morning, you boil that down with three carrots, an onion, and some celery salt. You’ll have stock until Christmas.”
My mother looked up from the sink, where she was washing my roasting pan with a yellow sponge. She didn't ask what Graham had said. She didn't ask when I was going home.
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“Theo called on the landline while you were out there,” she said, her voice quiet over the sound of running water. “He’s at his friend Leo’s house with the babysitter. He wants to know if we saved him any drumsticks.”
“We saved him both,” I said, and for the first time in seven hours, my ribs didn't feel like they were holding up a collapsing roof.
