Thanksgiving in my house begins way before Thanksgiving when my mom starts to put about twelve leaves onto the antique mahogany dining table and sends out the white linen tablecloths to be starched and ironed and the silver candlesticks to be polished. She sets up all the folding chairs because she says she can’t think straight unless she can visualize where everyone will sit and where every platter will go, which is ridiculous but I know by now that you can’t argue with her. So when I have breakfast I sit at the end of the table and lift up the white cloth and put down a place mat and try not to make crumbs because if I do she’ll smack my head and have a meltdown.
What we do for Thanksgiving is invite about half the neighborhood over, which includes Ro’s entire family and their cousins and all of ours and Anthony’s loser friends, and when we start to count up all the people it usually comes to about forty. Then the question is how many turkeys and Anthony always plays big shot.
“Ma, leave it to me, okay?”
A week before Thanksgiving, he comes home with his trunk filled with like five, thirty-five pound turkeys from I don’t know where because he’s afraid if he doesn’t bring home enough he’ll get killed, but my mom sees them and yells.
“Anthony, what were you thinking, eh? Look at this kitchen. How many ovens do I have?”
“Three, Ma.”
“So how am I going to cook five turkeys?”
He brings two over to Ro’s and her mom has to cook them and then Dante usually steals a red wagon from some kid in the neighborhood and drags them back home that way.
This Thanksgiving because my dad is home and we’re not sure how long that will last, we go a little overboard and get two cases of Dom because if this is his last Thanksgiving here, we’re going to make it memorable. And then we order huge flower arrangements for the table and desserts from Ro’s dad because after all the cooking, my mom draws the line at baking.
Before vacation we get a ton of homework and after dinner I go upstairs and start doing it and then stop to think about the recount again and how screwed up the election was. And then out of the blue I start wondering what Michael does for Thanksgiving, if anything, and for no reason at all I start to imagine that he probably has a loser Thanksgiving and that thought doesn’t leave my head.
Then I wonder whether he has parents and where they live if he does and about brothers and sisters and the house where he grew up and yada, yada, yada, so, you know what’s coming. I decide that at night I’m going to call him and find out because he said I didn’t know anything about him, and I want to, have to, know more.
It’s easier for me to call him in the middle of the night. My head wakes me at some point after two and, almost instinctively, I pick up the phone. When it starts to ring my head gets totally crazed and I get filled with longing and think about starting out by telling him that I’m naked under the covers, but decide nuh-uh, I could never do that because he’d just hang up on slutty me.
On the third ring, he answers and waits. Didn’t he ever learn the word hello?
“Michael?
“Yeah.”
“Hi.”
“Hi, Gia.”
“You in bed?”
“No.”
“Where are you?”
“On the Henry Hudson.”
“What for?”
“Waiting.”
“For?”
“Speeders.”
This is not what I expected. “You’re still on nights?”
“For a while, yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you talk?”
“Nothing else going on.”
“I miss you.”
Silence.
“You miss me?”
“Gia…”
“I know you do, you bastard. I hope you hurt.”
He half laughs.
“So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
He snorts.
“What? Going home?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s that?”
“Baltimore.”
“To see your mom?”
“Yeah.”
“Does she cook—the whole Thanksgiving thing?”
“I cook,” he says.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“She doesn’t like to?”
Silence.
“It’s hard for her.”
“How come?”
“Long story.”
“What about your dad?”
Silence.
“No dad,” he says finally.
“Did he…die?”
“Yeah, he’s dead.”
I wait, expecting him to go on, but he doesn’t.
“Is it cold out?”
He laughs. “Yeah.”
“So what, you just sit in the car with the heat on?”
“Right.”
“I wish I was there. To keep you warm.”
“You’re doing that.”
I laugh.
“Shit,” he says suddenly. “Gotta go.”
He hangs up and I stare at the phone.
Progress.