I also thought about something Josh had told me once, months ago, when I'd promised him I would fight for his grandmother and not against his father. He'd said, "I just don't want anyone to have to leave." And nobody had to leave, in the end — not really. Mark's family had moved across town, but they came back for dinner. The house had room. The table had room. Even the empty chair had room.
"To Margaret," Eleanor said, raising her glass, her voice a little thick. "Who raised them all better than they deserved."
"To Margaret," we said, and drank, and Margaret laughed through her tears and told us all to stop being ridiculous, and Josh sat back down looking dazed and pleased with himself, and Mark kept his arm around him for a long time, and the evening went on, warm and golden, the way Thanksgiving evenings are supposed to go.
Chapter 42: Margaret Carves
I have thought about that moment many times since — Margaret standing at the head of the table with the carving knife in her hand, steady on her healed hip, the whole table gone quiet watching her. It seems like a small thing, a woman carving a turkey. But I had seen my mother, eighteen months before the story of this year even started, groggy and confused on pain medication, signing papers she didn't understand. I had seen her, on my first night home, on her hands and knees scrubbing a floor while her son's family watched television. I had seen her afraid to say she didn't understand, afraid to ask for help, afraid of being a burden in a house she had owned and then, for a terrible stretch, had not.
And now she stood there, carving the roast herself, because it was her house and her table and her Thanksgiving, and nobody was going to do it for her.
"Watch the joint," Eleanor advised from her seat. "There's a trick to the joint."
"I know the trick to the joint, Eleanor Vance. I have carved forty Thanksgivings and you have watched forty Thanksgivings and offered advice at every single one."
"And the turkeys have been excellent every single time," Eleanor said serenely. "Coincidence? I think not."
The table laughed, and Margaret carved, and the slices fell clean and even onto the platter, and when she finished, the table applauded — actually applauded, Josh starting it and everyone joining in — and Margaret bowed, deeply, like a performer taking a curtain call, the carving fork still in her hand.
"Thank you, thank you," she said. "You're too kind. Now eat, before it gets cold, because I did not stand here on this hip for applause, I stood here for dinner."
We ate. And as I watched my mother — seventy-one years old, widowed nine years, hip replaced and healed, house restored to her name — I thought about what it means for a woman to carve her own roast at her own table in her own house. It means she is not small there. It means no one is going to take the knife out of her hand, or the pen out of it either. It means, in the smallest and largest way, that she is home.
Eighteen months ago, a man had put papers in front of this woman while she was medicated and called them insurance paperwork, and she had signed because she was groggy and afraid and wanted to be agreeable. Today she stood at the head of her own table and carved her own turkey and told six people to eat. I don't know if there's a better definition of getting your life back. I haven't found one.
I thought, too, about the lock I'd installed on her bedroom door a year ago — the night she'd slept with it locked for the first time in her life while I sat outside until her breathing evened out. She'd protested then. Now she locked it herself every night, by choice. That was the difference between then and now, really: then, the lock was something I did for her because the house wasn't safe; now, it was something she did for herself because the house was hers.
After dinner, when the table was cleared and we were all sitting with coffee, Margaret leaned back in her chair and looked around at all of us — at me, at Eleanor, at Tina and Josh, at Mark at the far end of the table — and she said, "This is a good table."
"It is," I said.
"The chair," she said, nodding toward the empty seventh setting, still in its corner. "I'm glad we set it. A table should always have room for one more. That's what your father used to say. He said a table that's exactly full is a table that's stopped growing."
I had never heard my father say that — or maybe I had, and just forgotten. Either way, I was glad Margaret remembered. I was glad there were things about him she still carried, nine years after he died, that had nothing to do with houses or papers or any of it.