Thanksgiving was mostly a family affair, and I was grateful to be included in it. My dried-fruit stuffing was a huge hit, as was the corn pudding with sauerkraut—my mother’s decades-old invention for the holiday, one of those family recipes that sounds impossibly weird to outsiders but which, as with many nontraditional side dishes, goes great with turkey. And that’s all that matters, on Thanksgiving, around the family table.
Candied yams, collard greens, scalloped potatoes. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a San Francisco Thanksgiving without garlic Dungeness crab.
“Pass another of them crabs over here, will you, Jessie?” said Baby Mike. I swear he had eaten three of the monster things already.
“Ooh, I’ll take one too,” said my brother Tomasz. I swear he saw Baby Mike’s capacity for massive ingestion as a personal challenge.
I had asked Sparkle to pick me up from the General when I was discharged on Sunday. She stayed for a cup of tea at Mahoney Brothers #45, and I was finally able to tell her about Anup and me.
Sparkle didn’t have much to say about it, and didn’t really offer an opinion on the big questions, the ones that had been plaguing me: Had we been wrong for each other all along? Or had it been a mistake to give up? Maybe Sparkle had seen the breakup coming before I had, and didn’t want to say so if there was no point in it. After all, Anup hadn’t reached out to me except with that anodyne get-well bouquet, and I wasn’t crying on Sparkle’s shoulder about the terrible mistake I’d made in letting it all fall apart. It hadn’t been a mistake. It was over between Anup and me.
Sparkle did offer me an unexpected and generous condolence, though, after she asked what I was going to do for Thanksgiving dinner, now that the plans with Anup had vanished.
“Tommy doesn’t have time to cook and I don’t have the energy, so we’ll just go out. He knows of some fancy restaurant down in Mountain View that—”
Sparkle’s eyes shot wide open in horror. “You will not,” she snapped. “Not on Thanksgiving you will not! You are coming to my mom’s.”
“Sparkle! You can’t—”
“Yes I can and I will and I am. You are coming to my mom’s and joining the rest of my family. There’s already seventeen or eighteen of us. We’ll make room for one more.”
“But then Tommy—”
“Two more.”
So there we sat, Tommy and I, thankful and drowsy.
“Michael! Do not feed that dog pie from the table!” Gayle, Sparkle’s mother, had insisted I bring Bea along. Gayle was an animal lover, she said, and there were two other dogs in the house already. Bea couldn’t have been happier about the invitation. Gayle made sure to pull me aside, too, and thank me for coming.
“I know this sounds strange, but I miss my brother—and having you here...makes me feel better. Because you took care of Curtis. That is strange, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t, at all, and I told Gayle as much. Nothing is strange when you’re mourning.
“Every year, we all hoped Curtis might show up for Thanksgiving, you know. Sometimes we knew where he was at, and sometimes he didn’t want to tell us, but we always set a place for him.” She smiled sadly. “I miss my baby brother. I’m glad Sparkle invited you—and yours.”
When the pies went around, I squeezed in next to Tommy, who had finagled his way to the kids’ end of the table. He finds ordinary adult conversation burdensome; and, besides, he has an anarchical streak that resonates with children.
I’d had some wine, not a lot, but enough that I lowered my guard to ask my brother a question that had been nagging at me ever since I got out of the hospital.
“Was Mamusia legal when she came here?”
He looked at me in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Did she have the right papers. Is our mother a legal immigrant, or an illegal immigrant?”
“She married Dad, remember?”
“And he’s native-born, yes, fine. So she’s a citizen free and clear—now. But how did she get in? Did she have a sponsor and all that, or did she come on a visa and overstay it? It couldn’t have been a student visa. Was she a tourist? Were they even giving out tourist visas to the United States from Warsaw in...what, 1982?”
The questions troubled Tomasz, though he tried not to show it. He shrugged. “You’d have to ask Mamusia, I suppose. Good luck with that.”
“She’s never mentioned anybody else from the family who was here first. It’s not like they had come here and set up, and she was just the latest link in the chain...”
“Not as far as you know, maybe. Ask her. And, like I said, powodzenia to you.”
I had indeed gone right back to work on Monday after my discharge, though the neurology attending thought that was a terrible idea. All three days up until Thanksgiving were busy ones, too; I did two suicides (one by hanging and one by handgun), three overdoses, and a motorcycle accident. Sunshine Ted groused about Dr. Howe taking me off the homicide call rotation, but then he got lucky and only caught one over the course of three days anyway. I managed to convince Howe to return me to the rotation over the holiday long weekend. He agreed, probably figuring it would be quiet.
As soon as I got out of the autopsy suite and behind my desk each of those three days, the very first thing I did was to place a call to Eva Yung. I never got through to her, but each time I left a message asking for updates on the situation with Samuel Urias.
On Wednesday, she sent me an email in reply. It read, in its entirety, Still no word from Sam.
“Hey kids,” said Tommy, “want to learn the shoelace trick for hacking bar code scanners?”
I got an email from Inspector Ramirez on Wednesday, too. He wanted to let me know that Denis Monaghan had, as Eva Yung predicted he would, taken a deal with ADA Jason Bevner. Monaghan was going to prison for twenty-two years—parole-eligible, which in his case meant deportable, after thirteen. The ADA would not need to interview or depose me, unless I insisted on pressing separate charges in the assault and battery on my person. If I did so insist, then the DA would consider a new charge. So said Ramirez, anyhow.
No, they wouldn’t consider any such thing, and I knew it. They got their guy, and had avoided trial doing it. They would move on.
Natalie Haring would get her double-indemnity insurance payout. Jeffrey Symond would get the money to keep the business thriving until he could hire a new creative genius. Oskar Haring might even get Grandpa’s gun back, cleaned of cement—and my blood—but no worse for wear. He could still take it out target shooting.
SoMa Centre would rise above the corner of Sixth and Folsom.
“Hey,” I said to Tommy, “my head’s starting to hurt again. You should stay, but I’m going home.”
A steel band cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” woke me. I managed to grab my phone and whisper hello.
It was Cameron Blake. There had been a stabbing at a home on Euclid Avenue. “I’m betting it’s gonna be the carving knife,” he said.
“Let me get a pen,” I whispered. I did, and he gave me the address. I peered at the bedside clock. It was 2:30 in the morning. Euclid is only ten or fifteen minutes away from my cable-car cottage, so I made sure to establish that the PD was on the scene, because I was sure to arrive before the morgue van. Cameron assured me that the cops were there, and that CSI was on their way, too.
“Okay,” I said.
I realized I was still whispering. Why was I whispering? The dog was asleep on the floor. In the bed, I was alone.