He was done with the onions and didn’t care for the yams, but there were enough mashed potatoes and stuffing and pea casserole to last a week, plus extra turkey and gravy in the basement, in case Emily was gone longer. She’d bought a twenty-pounder to feed seven people, two of whom were children. More than once, over the phone, she’d needlessly instructed him not to throw away the carcass so she could make soup, which she said she liked better than Thanksgiving dinner, a confession that struck him as blasphemous. It was his favorite. Lunch and dinner he prepared the same plate, making a crater in his potatoes for gravy, covering it with Saran wrap and fishing it from the microwave with oven mitts, giving the cranberry its own separate dish. He ate in the breakfast nook, watching the news, meaning he saw it three times, the stories repeating until he knew what the neighbor down the street from the fire or the drug bust or the home invasion was going to say. He quickly ran out of Lisa’s cinnamon whipped cream, and while he blamed the pumpkin pie for his heartburn, he liked having it. At his side, Rufus waited, angling for a bite of crust.
He didn’t mind eating alone so much, but as the week passed he was surprised to find he missed doing the dishes. Dinner, especially, seemed incomplete. With no mixing bowls or Cuisinart parts or pots and pans to clean, he could go days without running a load. Each time he rinsed his plate and added it to the rack, he saw it as a loss.
Emily worried that with her not there to feed him, he wasn’t eating right. “What did you have for dinner?”
“L.O.’s.”
“Uck. Aren’t you sick of them yet?”
In Bastogne, surrounded, they’d eaten a horse they’d found frozen in a flattened barn. The horse was small, and the rats had been at it. The joke was that it was some kid’s pony. They roasted it over a fire, the meat sizzling, and lined up with their kits like a regular mess call. As they ate, they laughed and licked the grease from their fingers. It was too rich for their empty stomachs and made them sick, half of the company throwing up in the snow. In his bedroll after lights-out, Embree made neighing sounds. That winter, how many times had Henry dreamed of his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner?
“No,” he said. “I like them.”
“I thought you were supposed to be watching your salt.”
“I’m supposed to be watching my everything.”
“Enjoy it now, mister, ’cause come Sunday things are going to be different.”
“Promises, promises.”
“It’s true. She’s coming home tomorrow, ready or not, and I’m getting the heck out of here.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“I’m not so sure it is, but I’m done arguing with her.”
He celebrated with a piece of pie—a mistake, he realized later, swallowing glass after glass of water to keep down the sour reflux. In Bastogne, he’d eaten his fill with no ill effects besides some wild dreams. Now a slice of pie kept him up half the night.
Knowing she was coming home, he didn’t feel the need to change his diet—in fact, the opposite. Her first day back, she’d go shopping and make soup. His job now was to clean out the fridge, and he attacked it with purpose, each meal doing double duty as he chipped away at what remained—finishing the pie, then the cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and stuffing, and lastly the pea casserole, running a load of Tupperware—trying to fix it so that by the time she arrived, it would be all gone.