"Turkey," I read aloud. "Stuffing. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. Rolls. Two pies, Tina is bringing those. Gravy, obviously. Cranberry sauce — canned, not the fancy kind, your father always liked the canned kind with the ridges."
"Your father had excellent taste in cranberry sauce," Margaret said. She was sitting at the table in her housecoat, her hair still damp from the shower, and she looked, I thought, about ten years younger than the woman I had found scrubbing the floor on my first night home. The aide came twice a week now, and Margaret had stopped pretending she did not enjoy it. Her hip held. Her garden had given tomatoes all summer. She was, in every way that mattered, herself again.
"Seven people," I said, scanning the list. "That's a lot of food."
"Seven settings," Margaret corrected. "Six people and one extra."
I looked up. "One extra what?"
"One extra setting." She said it the way she said everything that winter: as though it were obvious and I was being slow. "For whoever needs it."
I opened my mouth, and then I closed it. In the months since the mediation, I had learned when to argue with my mother and when not to. This was a not. "Okay," I said. "An extra setting. For whoever needs it."
"Exactly." She took the list back and added, in the margin, the words EXTRA PLATE in capital letters, underlining it twice. "Now. I need you to get the big roasting pan down from the top shelf, because I am not climbing up there on this hip, and then I need you to tell me honestly whether the dining room curtains need washing, because Eleanor said they looked tired and I told her she looked tired, but privately I think she may have a point."
We spent that Sunday the way we had spent most Sundays that autumn: moving through the house together, Margaret directing and me executing, both of us pretending this was purely practical and both of us knowing it was something else. I climbed up and got the roasting pan, heavy and blackened with forty years of Thanksgivings, and Margaret ran her hand over it the way some women touch jewelry. We stood in the dining room holding the curtains up to the light, and Margaret decided they could go one more year, and I agreed, because they could.
While we worked, the phone rang, and it was Ruth, calling to confirm the pies and to ask, in a voice pitched carefully casual, whether there was anything else she should bring. "Just yourselves," Margaret told her, loud enough for me to hear across the room. "And Josh's appetite. That's the main ingredient."
After she hung up, Margaret was quiet for a moment, turning the grocery flyer over in her hands. "Ruth called me last week," she said. "Just to talk. She said Mark's been — she said he's been different. Quieter. She thinks the new job agrees with him."
"That's good," I said, and meant it, and Margaret nodded, and we went back to the curtains, and neither of us said what we were both thinking: that quieter was good, that different was good, that a year ago none of us would have believed a phone call about pies could feel like a small victory.
It was the first Thanksgiving since I had come home. It was the first Thanksgiving Mark's family would eat at this table since before the papers were signed. It was, in every way, a test — not of the food, which would be fine, but of whether the people could sit in the same room and pass the gravy without the past sitting down between them.
On the Monday before Thanksgiving, I went grocery shopping with Margaret's list and came home with three bags more than the list allowed, because I had stood in the store and remembered every November of my childhood and bought accordingly. The woman at the checkout asked if I was cooking for an army, and I said, "Something like that," and she laughed, and I carried the bags out to my car feeling strangely light.
Josh came over on Tuesday after school and peeled potatoes at the kitchen table while Margaret supervised from her chair, correcting his technique with the patience of a woman who had taught two children to peel potatoes and had strong opinions about it.
"Thinner," she told him. "You're taking half the potato with the skin. Your mother would cry."
"My mother doesn't care about potato skins," Josh said, grinning. He was sixteen now, taller than me, with his father's easy charm and, I was increasingly sure, his grandmother's stubborn streak. "She cares about whether I do my homework."
"She should care about both," Margaret said firmly. "A boy who wastes potatoes will waste everything."