Wild Turkey

If you’d asked me which Cobb I’d have preferred to see first, Samantha or Bill, I would have said Sam, no question, even with the not-so-vague unease I was feeling about the roads less traveled. Our whole lives, Bill Cobb and I had never been more than barely civil to each other—or maybe I should say that I had never been more than barely civil to Bill, although he was so dense and good-natured that it never seemed to make any difference in the way we got along. I’m guessing it would be a strain on even the best of friends when both of them have loved the same woman and only one can have her, and Bill and I were never the best of friends.

I would have preferred Samantha, but it was Bill who pulled up at my front door on the Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving. We’d had a couple of days of bad ice storms and were currently in the middle of a morning fog so dense I could barely see the outlines of the barn not twenty yards away. Our phone and electricity had both gone out on Sunday night, and although the electricity had come back on after we’d spent a night curled up in the living room in front of the fireplace, the phone was still defunct.

So when the ghostly form of a white Range Rover, headlights on, appeared almost magically in the driveway as I sat at the table drinking a cup of coffee, the unexpectedness of it gave me a hearty thump in the chest. I didn’t recognize the vehicle, although I knew what it was. I can assure you that no one in my immediate acquaintance owned a Range Rover.

That was itself a big clue, though, and as it pulled up close to the house, I was pretty sure that I had solved the mystery. When the driver had to lower his head to get out of the Range Rover, I was sure of it—Big Bill Cobb, as tall as ever, a little wearier, to judge by his sagging shoulders.

I hopped to the front door by the time he knocked.

“Morning, Bill,” I said, and opened the door to him. “What brings you out this way?” I held out my hand, and he shook it once, perfunctorily, the grip clammy. He looked down at my foot, raised off the floor while I balanced, wobbly, on the other. Then without a question, he began.

“Your phone was out, and I’m in town for the week. Thought I’d come up to spend some time with the folks at Thanksgiving. Samantha’s got the girls for the holiday. Don’t know if she’ll be coming up here or not.” He wet his lips, took a deep breath, slid his eyes over to see how I was reacting. “I guess you’ve heard all about that.”

I hopped back into the kitchen, and after a momentary pause, he followed me. “Only a little,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all for the best, I suppose,” he said, although he did not sound like he believed that. I indicated a chair at the table, but he shook his head. “I can’t stay. I just wanted to ask if we might be able to get the guys together before Sunday. And your phone is out.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

We looked across the table at each other. The defunct phone might be our only point of agreement.

Then the back door opened, and Phillip, finished with the morning feeding, stepped into the washroom and shed his boots. “Well,” I said, “here’s at least one guy we can ask.”

Phillip stopped stock still in the doorway of the kitchen when he saw Bill. He hadn’t had the benefit—if that’s what it was—of the Range Rover appearing out of the mist, and I doubt he had seen Bill face-to-face since Bill went off to college.

“Phillip.” Bill nodded. “Good to see you.” This sentiment did not travel from his mouth to the rest of his face. We were certainly a superficial group; I wondered for a moment what we might be able to say to each other with complete sincerity.

“Hello, Bill,” Phillip said. “Welcome home.”

That wasn’t it, exactly, although Phillip’s heart was in the right place. Bill gave him another of those nonsmiles. “I was hoping maybe we could get together for an extra practice this week. Would you be up for something like that?”

“I’d have to check with my social secretary,” Phillip said. “But I’ll bet we could arrange something.”

“What about after varsity practice today?” I asked. “I’d rather do that than tomorrow afternoon.”

“Call the other guys—” Bill began, before remembering my defunct phone. “Okay, I’ll get in touch with Oz and Bobby Ray and see what they think. I’d just like to get out on the court, run a little. I’ve been shooting some. At home.” He broke off abruptly and turned away.

“I’m sorry,” Phillip said. “I hope all that will work out.”

“Thanks,” Bill said gruffly. He was, if anything, even less happy about accepting sympathy from Phillip than he was from me. “I’ll see you guys in town. I’ve picked up some uniforms and some warm-ups. Let’s plan on this afternoon and hope everyone can be there.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for driving out.” I ushered him to the front door. We did not speak again as the door closed.

Only when the taillights disappeared into the fog did Phillip turn to me and say, “That was weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I think he had something more on his mind than basketball.”

“Lots of things besides basketball,” I said. “Whatever, I’m glad he’s gone. It spooked me.” And it had, his somber appearance out of the fog like an apparition in a bad dream.

Phillip looked down at the carpet. “When I saw who it was, I thought he might be one of those unbalanced ex-husbands come out to do you harm.”

“Hey,” I said, holding up my hands. “I haven’t had any special influence in that household for twenty years.”

“Right.” His eyes flicked to mine and away again. “So what are you thinking he was thinking?”

I hopped back into the kitchen. “About what?”

Phillip sat down with me at the table, and this time he turned and looked me full in the eye. “About you and Samantha,” he said.

“Has the whole world totally lost its mind? What do I have to do with them splitting up?”

“I can’t speak for the whole world,” he said. “All I can speak for is me. I remember how things used to be. And I wondered how you feel about her now.” He spoke with sincerity, and my face burned, and I turned away from him. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask. I don’t mean to put my foot in where it doesn’t belong. But you’ve been good to me. I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you.”

I tried to lighten the mood. “What is your grandmother saying?”

He laughed. “My grandmother? She says the spirits are telling her something big is in the wind. It could be you. It could be a winning night at bingo.” He stood up, got ready to go, but before he did, he let his hand drop for a moment to my shoulder, a strong, solid presence. “You don’t need my advice. But you’ve got a good family here. Take care of them.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m trying. I’m doing the best I can.”

“Okay,” he said. “Nobody can ask for more than that.” He paused at the door. “You want to run with me out to the house?”

“Why, that gasket come in?”

“Yeah, for all the good it’ll do. But I thought I’d humor you and help you put it on.”

I pushed myself upright and gathered my crutches from their leaning place in the corner. “You’re a good man, Phillip,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, helping me pull on my jacket and gloves.

Maybe he didn’t know.

But I did.

We didn’t have much success with the truck that afternoon. My mind was on other things, including the icy wind that whistled across the plains, made a brief detour around Phillip’s trailer, and then flowed directly down the back of my neck. When it came time to go to practice, I was more than ready.

“It’ll be done when it’s done,” Phillip said when I apologized for our slow progress.

“It’s just that we’re not going to get much done on it the rest of the week,” I explained as I hoisted myself into the passenger seat. “Thanksgiving, then the basketball tournament Friday and Saturday. And I was hoping to see this thing fired to life along about now.”

He laughed. “I don’t want to rule it out completely,” he said. “But that thing has been out of commission almost as long as I have.”

He dropped me off and headed out to the house to do chores early so he could come back and shoot with the other guys after practice, which I was running on my own. Carla had volunteered to stay on and help, but I had started to feel unnecessary, never a good feeling at the best of times.

I ran a hard practice, maybe to compensate for not being able to do anything physical myself: fast-break drills, rim to rim, the rebounder kicking the ball out to midcourt; full-court presses; half-court traps. I had them hustling and puffing, and their pace for their final laps was noticeably slower than usual, their arms dangling uselessly, feet dragging. It was a good practice, though, and maybe would help compensate some for the turkey, gravy, and pie they would consume over the next few days.

Oz and Bobby Ray were the first to get dressed and join me on the court after the boys were finished. I was standing with a ball at the free throw line, my crutches planted in my armpits.

“How’s our star player?” Bobby Ray asked, clapping me on the shoulder so hard I had to pinwheel my arms to keep from falling flat on my face.

“I haven’t seen him yet,” I said, surrendering the ball to someone who could do something useful with it and making my way to the sideline.

“Bill said he came out and talked to you. How does he look?” Oz asked quietly as Bobby Ray banked in a set shot from about eighteen feet.

“Mentally? Physically? Emotionally?”

“Is there a difference?”

“No,” I said. “He looked pretty bad.” The crutches and I winced our way over to the bleachers, and I sat down with a sigh of pleasure on the hard wood.

“It’s understandable,” Oz said. “In his place I’d feel the same.” He picked up a ball from the cart next to me and dribbled out to join Bobby Ray and Phillip, who had wandered in and was now being greeted by Bobby Ray and Oz with varied degrees of enthusiasm.

B. W., in street clothes and tennis shoes, his hair freshly shampooed and toweled, emerged from the locker room and took a seat next to me in the stands. “I’ll hang around to drive you home,” he said, leaning back on his elbows on the bench behind him. “We haven’t had much time to talk lately.”

“No kidding,” I said. “But Phillip said he’d be glad to bring me out. You don’t have to hang around and watch these old guys just for my sake.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Hey, I can stand in for you again if it’d help.”

“It would,” I said. “That would give me a better sense of where these guys are.”

Bill was the last one to arrive, dressed in new Nike Air Jordans and a satiny warm-up suit, his arms full of boxes, which he set down on the bleachers in front of me.

“Gather ’round, gather ’round,” he called out in a hearty Santa Claus voice. “Got warm-ups and game uniforms for everyone.” Then he proceeded to call out names and pass out correspondingly labeled boxes.

“Thanks,” Oz said when he opened his box and ran his finger across the sheen of his warm-up.

“These are beautiful,” Bobby Ray said, and his face lit up. As he held up his jersey to his chest, I saw that it was an exact replica of the home jerseys we had worn in the state championships in 1975.

“Had them custom-made from a photo,” Bill said. “Naturally, they don’t make them like this anymore. Jerseys are different and everybody is wearing those big baggy shorts.”

“Those big baggy shorts would look a lot better on me nowadays than the ones we used to wear,” I said, but I was clearly outdone, outvoted, outuniformed. I don’t know what I’d thought we would wear for our big game; I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that Bill would have thought about it. “Thanks,” I finally said. The jersey seemed like it would fit all right when I held it up to my chest, so at least Bill hadn’t been so carried away by his nostalgia kick that he’d ordered the same sizes we’d worn in high school.

To his credit, when he skinned off his warm-ups, Bill wasn’t dressed in some sort of designer basketball ensemble. He was wearing a pair of old drawstring shorts and a T-shirt proclaiming “Bush for Governor.”

He looked good, especially compared to the rest of us. He had been lifting weights, judging from his bulky shoulders and upper arms, although like most guys who lift, he had concentrated on his upper body to the detriment of his legs, which were fit but skinny. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so critical—the man was in a whole lot better shape than I was. It was just a symptom, I guess, of how much I had allowed myself to dislike him over the years.

It’s almost impossible to play basketball with someone you don’t like. Maybe some people can separate the person and the player, but I never could. Coach always used to get on me about feeding Bobby Ray when Bill was open under the basket, but I’ll be honest: Then, and now, I didn’t want him to have the ball, didn’t want him to score, didn’t want him to look good. He already looked good enough.

I was glad B. W. was out there now instead of me; at least he could pass off to Bill without feeling a twinge of anything.

Mostly they shot around, rebounded each other’s misses. Bill worked down in the low post, shooting turnaround jump shots and hook shots, and he shot well enough, although he seemed a little stiff.

Why did I still feel an inner warmth when he muffed a hook shot or misjudged a rebound? Sam had left him, which might have made me happy, even if I couldn’t have her. But if anything, I should have commiserated with him; more than anyone, I knew what it felt like to love her and then lose her.

“Instruct us, Coach,” Bobby Ray called over after they’d shot for twenty minutes or so. I called out an offense, and B. W. pointed out positions—and in a few words reminded Bill what his role was. The kid was not just a better player than I was, he was also a better coach, and for a brief moment, I was seized by a burning resentment that smoldered in my gut before turning into something like pride. So talented, so smart—

I hoped he was making the right decision about spending his life out among the trees.

The rest of the practice was uneventful. Bill meshed all right with the offensive setup we’d been running, although I noticed that he didn’t speak to Phillip and was reminded that there was another of our old tensions come back to visit us twenty years on.

After practice, I hobbled out to B. W.’s truck, him following close to make sure I didn’t get knocked over by the gusting wind or slip on the ice patching the parking lot.

“Thanks,” I said after I’d clambered inside the cab and pulled my crutches in after me like a turtle retracting his limbs.

“Jeez, it’s cold,” he said as he slammed his door and shivered, his shoulders jerking involuntarily toward his neck.

“Sneak preview of Montana,” I said. “It’s not too late to reconsider.”

“Dad,” he said, turning and giving me the disapproving look I deserved.

The truck started on the third try. We’d have to work on this one before much longer—certainly before I trusted him to drive it north to Montana.

“How do you feel about playing this weekend?” I asked. “Think we’ll do okay?”

B. W. made the face he used to make when we gave him medicine. “I’m not really excited about it,” he said. Then he shrugged. “But maybe it’ll be fun.”

“Thanks for sticking with it,” I said. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

B. W. inclined his head slightly toward me as if to say, Yeah, you would be in a mess of trouble. He drove across the road where we should have turned left toward the highway, and I must have raised an eyebrow, because he looked at me and then cleared his throat.

“I thought we might just drive around a little,” he said. “It’s too cold to sit down by the pond and talk in your secret place.”

“Used to be secret,” I corrected. “I hear they published its location in the Daily Oklahoman.”

We drove for a bit, the radio playing low, the tune unrecognizable although I could feel the bass, which buzzed the cones of the cheap speakers I had helped B. W. install in the doors. We seemed to be drifting aimlessly around the west side of town, past tiny houses with particle or wood siding. The affluent families in this part of town had aluminum or even vinyl siding.

Phillip’s grandmother lived in this part of town.

Gloria—and now Michael—also lived in this part of town. Michelle was still pushing me to visit them. I hadn’t knocked on the door since my last abortive try, although on a couple of occasions I had coasted past on my way home like an adolescent cruising neighborhoods to see if Michael might be outside doing lawn work.

Of course, these were forlorn hopes. I knew my son. First, he would not willingly do lawn work in any season; second, if he were outside for some reason and I pulled up, he still would have nothing to say to me.

We passed ever-shabbier houses, their wooden siding peeling or unpainted, approaching the end of 8th Street. “Dad, what’s wrong?” B. W. asked, and he threw the truck into park. “You seem—distant—lately. Lauren has noticed it too. Are you mad at me? Are you upset about Michael?”

“Family meeting,” I muttered. We sat for a moment in silence before I looked over at him. “I hadn’t realized it was that noticeable.”

“Well, you’re not exactly Robert De Niro,” he said. “You can’t pretend you’re feeling something you’re not. You’re just not that good an actor.”

“No,” I said. “I guess I’m not.” I shifted uncomfortably and looked out the window. We were parked in front of the shell of a burned-out house. Boards were nailed diagonally across the smoke-darkened windows. I could understand the impulse to try and protect what is yours; I could understand the impulse to try and keep people out; what I could not understand was why you would nail up your windows after your house had burned down.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I said.

“So it’s more than just me and Michael,” B. W. said. He seemed relieved. “That’s what Lauren thought.”

I nodded. “It’s more than you two. It’s more than Lauren. It’s more than your mom. But it’s also all of you.”

“Lauren is afraid you’re going to leave us,” B. W. said, and his voice caught, and I could tell that Lauren was not the only person who feared that possibility. I didn’t ask what made them think that, didn’t try to plead innocence.

I wondered suddenly how much they knew about me and my sad history, how much they had always known.

“I don’t think I could do that,” I said finally, and I looked across to catch his gaze. My equivocal wording didn’t go unnoticed, but it was as close to a promise as I could make. “I don’t want to.”

“Then don’t,” he said, and he tried to be gruff but couldn’t quite manage it. “Please don’t,” he amended.

We sat, both of us looking down at our respective floor mats. There was too much here, too many years, too many lost opportunities. How could I even begin to explain?

“Your mother’s going to wonder about us,” I said. He nodded, and throwing the truck in gear he executed a U-turn that took us through the burned-out house’s yard and into the opposite ditch before putting us in the direction of home.

“How was your day?” Michelle asked me that night after we’d fed the kids. We were rinsing dishes, and I was standing at the sink without my crutches with only a little discomfort and only a few grimaces of disapproval from family members who noticed. The kitchen was beginning to fill with wonderful smells from the pumpkin and peach pies Michelle had put in the oven earlier.

“Not bad,” I said. “Practice was not quite a total disaster. My old men were panting like Frank.”

“What was it like being with Bill?” She bent to put bowls in the dishwasher. I took a moment to see what she might be asking, but it seemed like a straight enough question.

“I didn’t like it,” I said. “He took over, the way he always does. He bought warm-ups and jerseys for the team. And those old-fashioned shorts we used to wear. Like I want my flabby middle-aged butt hanging out for the town to see.”

“John,” she scolded, and looked around to see if the kids could hear, although I knew they couldn’t or I wouldn’t have said it. “How is he doing?”

“Not so well. He put on a good front. But it was probably a mistake to come up here over the holiday.”

“That’s what I was telling Samantha,” she said, again bending to load the washer, although that was a little like shooting someone with a .357 Magnum then politely turning your head so as not to embarrass your victim by seeing the gaping hole.

“Urhmn,” I volunteered.

“I ran into her in the store,” she said. “We got to talking. She said it wasn’t much fun being home. Said she was really feeling judged. Said her folks were determined to get them back together. That they were supposed to have Thanksgiving dinner with Bill and his family so that the girls could be with both their parents.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I told her she ought to come out and have dinner with us,” she said. “Said that since we were having such a big group already she’d be welcome.” And this time she didn’t load the washer but ran warm water over her hands before wiping them dry with the dishtowel.

What I wanted to ask was “Are you crazy?” but of course, to state things quite so baldly was not our way. “Uhmm,” I said.

“She’s bringing candied yams,” Michelle said. “And a pecan pie.”

“I like pecan pie,” I said, and pulled the stopper out to let the rinse water drain.

“That’s what I told her.”

“How was school today?” I asked.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” she said, and her enthusiasm pushed for a moment past other thoughts and spread across her face. “Othello with my seniors, Gatsby with Mrs. Edmondson’s juniors. She was out sick again.”

“What part of Gatsby?”

“The big garden party. All the strange names of the party guests. And Gatsby alone in the house while everybody enjoys themselves at his expense.”

“Not the shirts?” I knew that was always her favorite part, that and the ending.

“Not yet,” she said, and she placed the back of her hand against her forehead in a highly dramatic way prior to declaiming, “‘I’m just crying because I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts.’”

“Is she crying about shirts?” Lauren asked, popping into the kitchen and sniffing the wondrously spiced air. “Mom, have you popped your cork?”

“It’s literature, my dear,” I said, pronouncing the second “t” in a way I fancied was British and high-toned. “Perhaps someday you’ll understand.”

She looked at me intently. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand crying over shirts.”

B. W. entered at the end of this exchange. “If someone took your favorite Mo Betta shirt I bet you’d be bawling your eyes out,” he said. He nudged her away from the refrigerator door with his hip and opened it, although you could see that his attention was not on the food in the fridge but rather somewhere else.

“Didn’t I just feed you two?” I asked.

“I want something sweet,” Lauren said, and B. W. said, “I’m still hungry.”

“There’s more cookies,” Michelle said. “Everything else is for Thanksgiving. Hands off the pies.”

Their faces fell—hope springs eternal—but they settled, if you can call it that, for a handful of Michelle’s carob chip health cookies, baked with applesauce instead of butter and still pretty good.

“I hope it was okay to invite Samantha,” Michelle said after the kids had left. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” I said, and filled my mouth with cookie.

“I thought it would be good to spend a little time with her,” she said on her way out. She didn’t say how she thought it would be good or for whom, and although I sat there for awhile longer, I still didn’t have a clue.

I spent Wednesday making noodles from scratch, boiling chickens to go along with them, and getting things ready for Michelle to make her stuffing when she got home. Our bird was a good-sized tom I had shot the previous fall over on the Old Place; he had spent the year filling the top of one of our freezers, and to be honest, I was going to be glad to see him out of there, even though I hadn’t been able to replace him this fall. I took him out in the morning and stuck him in the sink to thaw all day.

Very early on Thanksgiving morning we wrestled the turkey—stuffed full of bread crumbs, diced apples, walnuts, sage, and other things in Michelle’s secret recipe—into a pan and then into the oven, where it would spend the rest of its useful life in metal-walled safety before emerging golden brown to be dissected for the joy of holiday eaters. I drained the chicken broth from the chickens and began to cook my egg noodles in it while I picked morsels of meat from the bones to add to the huge pot later. Potatoes boiled in another large pot, ready for mashing; flowerets of broccoli and cauliflower steamed in a third. Although the world outside was cold and dark and dead, the kitchen was filled with light and steam and wonderful smells. It was almost enough to make me forget that my wife had invited Samantha Mathis Cobb to my house for Thanksgiving dinner, that a dozen people would be watching every move we made and listening intently to every word that passed between us.

As if a houseful of people weren’t pressure enough.

I still wasn’t sleeping much, and when I slept I was having dreams that struck me as portentous, although they were also simply painful. In the one I had had just before waking, I found myself sitting in a corner office, looking out onto some mythical sky-scrapered city—Metropolis, maybe. My desk was big, the size of an old Buick, bare mahogany except for the picture of Samantha in the corner, her lips pursed, an inscription reading,

To the only man
I’ve ever loved,
Sam

It was the pounding that finally got my attention. Outside my office door stood my kids—Michael, B. W., Lauren—banging their fists on a thick wall of glass. I realized it was the final scene from The Graduate, when Elaine is getting ready to marry that schmuck and instead makes another bad decision—to run away with Benjamin.

They were pounding on the glass, and from the shapes of their mouths, what they were shouting was “Dad!”

I wanted to let them in. And I wanted to hide under my desk.

What I did, at last, was wake up.

I believe in dreams. I don’t know that they’re necessarily signs, although I am open to that possibility. But I definitely think that they’re windows to the soul, a direct line to the unconscious, and it didn’t take a whole lot of thought to see that this Graduate dream was about choice, about making a painful decision that would hurt someone.

But what about Elaine’s last words to her mother, who told her, “It’s too late!”?

She said, “Not for me.”

And then she ran from one disaster to another.

I knew it wasn’t too late for me—but when every choice is going to hurt someone, when every choice is going to end in regret, what are you supposed to do?

Gradually the kids followed the smells into the kitchen for breakfast, noses twitching like rabbits as they got down bowls and cereal, poured milk. B. W. and Lauren even joined me for a cup of coffee while Michelle broke out the silver and inspected my parents’ old china for smudges and spots.

“What time are Grandpa and Grandma getting here?” Lauren asked. I deferred to Michelle, since they were her parents.

“When they get around to it, I guess,” she said. “Most likely whenever your grandma decides that she’s happy with her lemon meringue.”

“I hope she makes chocolate, too,” B. W. said. “I don’t like lemon.”

“She knows that,” Lauren said. “She always brings both.” Then she turned to me and announced, “I’m not eating any turkey. Mrs. Anderson told us that they’re raised on huge farms under inhumane conditions and that they pollute the water something awful.”

“I shot this one over on the Old Place,” I protested. “It’s a free-range turkey. It ate bugs or berries or whatever turkeys eat. It lived a happy life. You saw me bring it home. Remember, you asked me what I thought I was doing, shooting another of God’s creatures?”

“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s a protest.”

“More for me,” B. W. said.

“Just as long as you save room for pie,” Michelle said.

The Hooks, Michelle’s mom and dad, were, as always, our first arrivals. They pulled up in front of the house just past ten o’clock. I wasn’t completely dressed yet, but the kids ran outside to help them with their precious Thanksgiving cargo. Michelle was pulling on one of her favorite T-shirts, a sort of orange, and then buttoned an embroidered vest over it, while I pulled on a clean pair of Wranglers, my dress boots, and a denim shirt.

Carla arrived at eleven thirty with a squash casserole. Michael Graywolf, his wife, and three kids arrived at eleven forty-five bearing fresh-baked rolls and a sugar-cured ham. Oz and Caroline and their four boys, hellions all, showed up around noon, each boy carrying something appropriate to his size and level of trustworthiness: relish plate, green beans, homemade fudge, strawberry cake.

The table and cabinets had begun to resemble the all-you-can-eat bar that is Thanksgiving, the kids’ tables had been set up in the living room, and we were beginning to think about eating when it happened. A dark blue Buick Century pulled to a stop in front of the house, and Samantha and her two girls got out, although they loitered hesitantly near it.

“Go let them in,” Michelle told me, and I wandered to the front door, feeling every eye on me.

“Come in,” I called, sounding much heartier than I felt. “Come in!”

“Hello,” Samantha said with a wan smile as she leaned forward for a chaste hug. “I hope you don’t mind our coming.”

“Not at all,” I said, relieving her of what I presumed was candied yams.

“You look great,” she said.

No—she looked great, like a model, perfectly made up, every hair in place. It was the kind of face that probably doesn’t stay that way without a nip or tuck here and there, the kind of hair that doesn’t stay that color without an assist from the hairdresser, but who could argue with the results? The dream about the two of us in my truck flashed into my head, and it took a moment of mental wrestling to body-slam it to the mat.

The silence behind us was thunderous. “I’m glad you could join us,” I said, and turned toward the kitchen with my burden. Michelle came forward to steer the girls over to the other kids and make introductions and then conducted Samantha back to where we were.

“Everything smells so good,” Sam said, nodding at the faces she knew.

“As soon as Phillip gets here, we’ll say grace,” I said.

“Phillip One Horse?” Her voice could have expressed either surprise or disapproval. I opted for the first.

“My cousin is becoming a social butterfly,” Michael Graywolf said. “First he agrees to play basketball and make a spectacle of himself. Now he’s coming to Thanksgiving dinners.”

“Why don’t you all just go in and watch football until we’re ready,” Michelle said. “It won’t be long now.”

And it wasn’t—maybe ten or fifteen minutes until Lauren came into the kitchen to tell us, “Phillip’s coming!”

“I’m glad,” I said. “Everybody’s getting hungry.”

“I’m glad too,” she said, and ran out the back door to meet him. Shortly thereafter, she slipped quietly back into the kitchen and pulled me into the back hall.

“Something’s wrong with Phillip,” Lauren said. “He hasn’t gotten out of the truck. When I waved at him, he just stared at me.”

“I’ll go check on him,” I said. “Don’t worry. He’s not used to being around a lot of people, you know. Probably just getting his courage up.”

Which he was, although not in the way I had hoped. As I stepped carefully out the back door, I could see him raise a bottle to his lips and take a long pull.

I got in the passenger side and shut the door quietly behind me. The cab smelled of whiskey.

It was cold in the truck—the heater wasn’t on, and Phillip was wearing only a windbreaker, a promotional jacket with a Winston logo.

“I can’t do it,” Phillip said, his eyes on the hand holding the bottle. “I’m sorry, John. I’m going home. I just can’t come in.” Then he caught my gaze and brought the bottle up so I could see the label. “Wild Turkey. Ha. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Phillip,” I said, “we’re all happy to see you. You don’t have to be so nervous.”

“Your family doesn’t make me nervous,” he said. “But there’s other people in there. I see all the cars. So many people.” He took another swig, shorter than the last.

“You know them all,” I said. “Or most of them. I’ll stick close to you. There’s nothing to be nervous about. And that—” I gestured at the bottle in his lap—“doesn’t help.”

“Nothing to be nervous about? If I know them, then they know me.” He gestured at himself. “They know all about me. They know about all I done. Did. Everybody knows.”

“That’s over and done with,” I said. “You’ve got a chance to put all that behind you now.”

He laughed, and it was not a pretty sound. “It’ll never be behind me,” he said. “Not as long as I live. I’m trapped in this life and there’s no way out. The most I can do is make it hurt a little less.” He tilted the bottle for another swallow, and my cheeks flushed with anger.

“That’s an easy way out, Phillip. Do you think you’re the only person who feels trapped? The only person who hurts? The only person who’s ever made mistakes? The only person who wants to escape?” I yanked the bottle from his surprised grasp and raised it to my lips before he could do a thing, the unaccustomed taste burning as it went down. I took a long drink and fought the roiling of my stomach, the watering of my eyes, before handing him the bottle back. “Maybe I’ll climb inside that bottle with you, Phillip,” I said. “How would that make you feel?”

“Stop,” he said. His eyes were wide.

“How’d it feel, watching me just now? How would you like to see me throw my life away, to hurt my family and friends, everyone who ever cared about me? It would be so easy to do. Easy as taking a drink.”

“Stop,” he said, and now he was pleading. “John, don’t talk like that.” He capped the bottle, and it dropped to the floor with a muffled thump. “I’m sorry. So sorry. I’ll just go now.”

“I want you to stay,” I said. “Please. Phillip, you can do this.” I dropped my head, and then I raised it.

I had figured it out—why this mattered so much to me. Why I couldn’t just let him give up. “Phillip, I need you to do this. To show me it can be done.”

He realized it too, and there was a moment when I saw the fear in his eyes. Then he took a deep breath, nodded slowly, as much to himself as to me.

He leaned over in front of me, rummaged unsteadily on the dashboard, and found an antiquated roll of butterscotch Life Savers. “For your breath,” he said, taking one and offering me the roll.

“All right,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go in and wash up.”

I led Phillip inside, we got cleaned up, and then Michelle invited everybody into the dining room for the prayer.

“Dad,” she said, turning to Mr. Hooks, “will you say grace?”

And there followed a rendition of the long and rambling prayer my father-in-law delivered every Thanksgiving while we stood, feet tapping, stomachs growling, as he thanked God for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, for our families and friends and all the people in all the world, for the wonderful lives we lived, for car phones and fax machines and satellite TV. It was a prayer that could have been a four-part TV miniseries.

“Amen,” we all said at the end, although that hardly seemed proportional to all the praying. “Amen,” Phillip said, a little more loudly than necessary, I thought, but no one else seemed to notice, and I marked it up to being hypersensitive.

B. W. and the kids filed past the food first and were exiled to the kids’ tables in the living room, all except for Lauren, who pleaded with her mom to stay with the adults. At the main table, so many leaves in that it looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, Michelle, Lauren, and I were joined by the Hooks, the Graywolfs, the Osbournes, Samantha, Phillip, and Carla. Lauren seated herself next to Phillip, and Michelle maneuvered things so that Carla was on his other side. Samantha was directly across the table from me.

Phillip talked shyly with Carla, his head rising only occasionally to meet her gaze. She asked him questions about basketball, talked about her team. I had not suspected she had it in her to be something other than brusque and abrasive, but there is plenty in the world that I don’t know.

Instead of looking across the table at Samantha or joining one of the conversations orbiting the table, I took a big bite of dark turkey, tender and juicy, and followed it with a bite of Michelle’s stuffing, a riot of spice, savor, and tang. I began to reconsider some of my recent feelings about life. My stomach even acted like it was willing to be friends.

Then Samantha leaned forward to talk to me, and a vista appeared that suggested someone may have paid for a little improvement on God’s original creation, and I guess maybe that distraction and the huge swig of Wild Turkey I’d taken on a practically empty stomach kept me from following the turn that the conversation around me was taking until it was too late.

“So what have you been doing with yourself, Phillip?” Mr. Hooks asked.

Phillip looked across the table at him, and I was pretty certain he was weaving.

“Since I got out of prison, you mean?” he asked, and his voice was again just a little too loud, and I could see a stirring around the table, heads rising from plates throughout the house.

“Phillip helps Dad around the farm,” my dear Lauren said, launching herself into the silence like a solitary skater onto a frozen pond.

“I keep a few cattle,” Phillip said. “I fish. I hunt.”

“Sounds like a good life,” Michael Graywolf said, trying, I think, to inject a little congeniality back into the conversation.

“I think,” Phillip said. “I think too much.” Then he stopped, laughed a disturbing laugh. “I think too much and I drink too much.”

That’s when I knew that our Thanksgiving dinner was doomed. The Hooks dropped a collective jaw as they realized that Phillip was toasted; Sam shook her head and rolled her eyes; Michelle and Lauren looked stricken.

I tried to think about what I might say to redirect conversation, tried to imagine that I was a talented conversationalist, and all I came up with was an innocuous remark about the Dallas Cowboys. And desperate as I was, I said it, although no one seemed to even hear.

“Well, what if I do drink too much?” Phillip was saying into his plate. “Maybe you would too. John said he might. Maybe all of you would.” He shoved his chair back from the table and stood, his voice rising with the rest of him. “Maybe all of you would. What do you know about me? What do you know about my life?”

And then, in that complete and utter silence, not a fork clanking on a plate, not an ice cube clinking in a glass of iced tea, he looked up and saw the faces turned toward his. As he looked from person to person, an expression of growing awareness spread across his own face. By the time he looked at me, his eyes were full of such pain that I could barely stand to meet his gaze. I read pain and anger and shame there before he looked away, mumbled, “I’m sorry,” stepped away from the table, and clomped out of the room and out the back door.

Michelle, Carla, and I all half rose to follow him. “I’ll go,” I said. “It’ll be okay.” The Hooks returned to their meals, since whatever had just happened had been planned since before the creation and therefore was not worth puzzling over, which was their way of looking at the world in general, and a soothing way of looking it must be. A slow murmur of conversation began at the other side of the table and spread slowly, like fire in a damp meadow.

I got up, stepped to the kitchen window, and saw Phillip standing outside in the cold without his jacket, his head down, his shoulders slumped. Maybe he was crying.

I headed for the back door, and as I pulled It open, I heard my truck start up.

By the time I was out the back door—slowed as I was, I probably was not the ideal candidate to chase Phillip down, although it’s also true that I knew him best of all those gathered for dinner—the truck had started down the driveway, and where it had previously stood was the bottle of Wild Turkey, empty.

I kicked at it with my good foot, and it spun like a bottle in a teenager’s game. It pointed at the house when it was done, at the house where I was going to have to return and face Samantha’s enhanced cleavage and my in-laws and a million questions, not one of which I was the least bit qualified to answer.

I was mad—mad at Phillip, mad at life, mad at myself, mad at the empty bottle.

If he was going to take off like that, he might at least have left a little behind for me.