“All you have to do is the turkey and the desserts,” Jamie told her. “They’re bringing everything else.”
Cora glared at him. “The turkey,” she said, her voice flat, “is the center of the whole thing. If I screw it up, the entire holiday is ruined.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” Jamie said. Then he looked at me, but I stayed quiet, knowing better than to get involved in this. “It’s a turkey. How hard can it be?”
This question had been answered the night before, when Cora went to pick up the bird she’d ordered, which weighed twenty-two pounds. It took all three of us just to get it inside, and then it wouldn’t even fit in the fridge.
“Disaster,” Cora announced once we’d wrestled it onto the island. “Complete and total disaster.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Jamie told her, confident as always. “Just relax.”
Eventually, he had managed to get it into the fridge, although it meant removing just about everything else. As a result, the countertops were lined not only with all the stuff Cora had bought for the meal, but also all the condiments, breads, and cans of soda and bottled water— everything that didn’t absolutely have to be refrigerated. Luckily, we’d been able to arrange to use Nate’s oven for overflow—he and his dad were going to be gone all day, getting double time from clients who needed things done for their own dinners—as nothing else could fit in ours while the turkey was cooking. Still, all of this had only made Cora more crabby, to the point that I’d finally taken a loaf of bread, some peanut butter, and jelly into the enormous dining room, where I could fix myself sandwiches and eat in peace.
“You know,” Jamie had said the night before, as Cora rattled around the kitchen beyond the doorway, “I think this is actually going to be a really good thing for us.”
I looked at my sister, who was standing by the stove, examining a slotted spoon as if not exactly sure what to do with it. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “This is just what this house needs—a real holiday. It gives a place a sense of fullness, of family, you know?” He sighed, almost wistful. “And anyway, I’ve always loved Thanksgiving. Even before it was our anniversary.”
“Wait,” I said. “You guys got married on Thanksgiving?”
He shook his head. “June tenth. But we got together on Turkey Day. It was our first anniversary, you know, before the wedding one. It was, like, our first real date.”
“Who dates on a major holiday?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly planned,” he said, pulling the bread toward him and taking out a few slices. “I was supposed to go home for Thanksgiving that year. I was pumped for it, because, you know, I’m all about an eating holiday.”
“Right,” I said, taking a bite of my own sandwich.
“But then,” he continued, “the night before, I ate some weird squid at this sushi place and got food poisoning. Seriously bad news. I was up sick all night, and the next day I was completely incapacitated. So I had to stay in the dorm, alone, for Thanksgiving. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?”
“No?” I said.
“Of course it is!” He sighed. “So there I am, dehydrated, miserable. I went to take a shower and felt so weak I had to stop and rest on the way back in the hallway. I’m sitting there, fading in and out of consciousness, and then the door across from me opens up, and there’s the girl that yelled at me the first week of classes. Alone for the holiday, too, fixing English-muffin pizzas in a contraband toaster oven.”
I looked in at my sister, who was now consulting a cookbook, her finger marking the page, and suddenly remembered those same pizzas—English muffin, some cheap spaghetti sauce, cheese—that she’d made for me, hundreds of times.
He picked up the knife out of the jelly jar. “At first, she looked alarmed—I was kind of green, apparently. So she asked me if I was okay, and when I said I wasn’t sure, she came out and felt my forehead, and she told me to come in and lie down in her room. Then she walked over to the only open convenience store—which was, like, miles away—bought me a six-pack of Gatorade, and came back and shared her pizzas with me.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I know.” He shook his head, flipping a piece of bread over. “We spent the whole weekend together in her room, watching movies and eating toasted things. She took care of me. It was the best Thanksgiving of my life.”
I glanced back at Cora again, remembering what Denise had said about her that night at the party. Funny how it was so hard to picture my sister as a caretaker, considering that had been what she was to me, once. And now again.
“Which is not to say,” Jamie added, “that other Thanksgivings can’t be equally good, or even better in their own way. That’s why I’m excited about this year. I mean, I love this house, but it’s never totally felt like home to me. But tomorrow, when everyone’s here, gathered around the table, and reading their thankful lists, it will.”
I was listening to this, but still thinking about Cora and those pizzas so intently that I didn’t really hear the last part. At least intially. “Thankful lists?”
“Sure,” he said, pulling another piece of bread out and bringing the peanut butter closer to him. “Oh, that’s right. You guys didn’t do those, either, did you?”
“Um, no,” I said. “I don’t even know what that is.”