Chapter 36: An Invitation
It was Margaret's idea first, though I was the one who made the call. We were at her kitchen table in late October, fourteen months after I had come home, and she was making a list — Margaret always made lists, in a handwriting that got more decisive with every item — and she said, without looking up, "I want them here for Thanksgiving. All of them. Mark and Tina and Josh."
I set down my coffee. "Are you sure?"
"No," she said frankly. "But I want it anyway. It's my house, and it's Thanksgiving, and I'm seventy-two years old and I don't want to spend it wondering whether my son feels welcome in my home." She looked up. "He did a wrong thing, Diane. I'm not forgetting that. But he's paying for it, month by month, and he's trying, in his way. And Josh is my grandson, and Tina — " She paused. "Tina was the first one to soften. I haven't forgotten that either."
I thought about it. I thought about the mediation room, and the porch talk, and the $300 landing on the first of every month. I thought about Mark standing on this porch saying he was glad I came home. I thought about Josh's toast — no, that hadn't happened yet, that was still to come. I thought about my mother, who had fought for her house and won it, and who was now choosing, freely, to open its doors.
"Okay," I said. "I'll call Tina."
Tina accepted at once — I could hear the relief in her voice, the quick, almost tearful "Oh, Diane, yes, we'd love to." Mark hesitated. I heard him in the background, asking who it was, and Tina covering the phone, and then Mark's voice, careful: "Are you sure your mom wants this?"
"She's the one who suggested it," I said. "She's making a list."
A pause. Then, quietly: "Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we'll be there."
I told Margaret, and she nodded with the satisfaction of a plan coming together, and then she did what she always did when she was pleased about something: she started planning in earnest. The menu took shape over the following days with the focus of a general planning a campaign. Turkey, obviously — "a big one, Diane, we're feeding seven" — and Margaret's cornbread dressing, and the sweet potato casserole with the pecan topping that had been my father's favorite, and green beans, and cranberry sauce from actual cranberries ("not the can-shaped kind, I have standards"), and pies. Tina, when told, immediately claimed the pies — "Tell Margaret I'm bringing the pies, all of them, she is not to bake a single pie" — and Margaret pretended to argue and then agreed with suspicious speed.
"Diane," Margaret said to me one evening, surveying her list, "do we have enough chairs?"
"We have enough chairs."
"And the good tablecloth? The one with the — "
"The one with the embroidered edge. It's in the sideboard. I saw it when we were sorting."
She nodded, and went back to her list, and I watched her — my seventy-two-year-old mother, standing steady on her healed hip, planning a Thanksgiving dinner in her own house, for her whole family, because she wanted to — and I thought about the first night I had come home, and the woman scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees, and how far we had come from that kitchen to this one.
The list grew. Groceries were assigned. Josh was put in charge of potatoes, a responsibility he accepted with great seriousness when Tina told him. Eleanor, invited as a matter of course — "She's practically family, and she'll die if she's not here to witness it" — promised to bring her famous rolls and her even more famous opinions. The house filled, slowly, with the particular energy of a celebration being prepared: not the tense energy of the mediation months, but something warmer, something chosen.
And Margaret planned the menu, item by item, crossing things off with her decisive handwriting, in her own kitchen, in her own house — the house Diane had bought for her eight years ago, the house that was finally and legally hers — and the ordinary, extraordinary sight of it was the best thing I had seen in all my fourteen months home.
Chapter 37: Preparations
Margaret planned Thanksgiving the way other people planned military campaigns. It began three weeks out, with a list written in her careful hand on the back of a grocery flyer, and it did not stop until the list had been rewritten twice and every item on it had been argued over, defended, and finally approved. I found the first draft on the kitchen table when I came over on a Sunday morning, and I stood there reading it while my mother watched me with the particular expression of a woman who has already decided everything and is now merely informing you.