That one caught me.
She knew me well.
Six days before Thanksgiving, I called Derek.
He answered from his car. I could hear the turn signal clicking.
“Have you ordered dinner?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“We’re looking at options.”
“Your mother told you more than a week before the holiday. You need to choose one.”
He stopped somewhere. The clicking ceased.
“Dad, I think this has gotten bigger than it needs to be.”
“Then make it smaller. Buy a meal. Ask everybody to bring a dish.”
“Mel really wanted Mom’s cooking.”
“Your mother really wanted someone to listen.”
He breathed into the phone.
“I thought she’d cool off.”
“She wasn’t having a tantrum, Derek.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“But you decided her answer didn’t count yet.”
He said nothing.
I stood in our laundry room looking at a basket of clean towels.
I remembered him at twelve, promising to take out the garbage, then waiting until Karen did it because she couldn’t stand the smell.
I had laughed about that once.
I wasn’t laughing now.
“She’s not cooking your dinner,” I said. “We’re taking the trip. Make your plans.”
“Okay.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, Dad.”
I wanted to believe that settled it.
When I told Karen, she nodded but didn’t look relieved.
“What?” I asked.
“He understands you mean it,” she said. “I’m not sure he believes I do.”
Over the next few days, we packed.
Karen checked the weather in Sarasota and put a cardigan over the clothes in her suitcase. I found my sunglasses in the glove compartment of the truck.
Ordinary preparations. Still, every item seemed to require Karen to make the decision again.
She held a pair of sandals above the suitcase.
“Twenty-five people,” she said.
“They have hosts.”
“I know.”
She put the sandals in.
On Tuesday evening, Derek sent a message saying he could pick us up at seven on Thanksgiving morning.
Mel says we can simplify. You wouldn’t need to start at five.
I read it twice.
Karen didn’t need to.
We won’t be home. Our flight leaves early. Please stop making plans that depend on us changing our minds.
Derek answered, I’m trying to find a compromise.
I’m not negotiating a smaller cooking assignment. I’m telling you we have other plans.
She placed her phone on the counter and went upstairs.
I stayed in the kitchen.
My navy apron hung inside the pantry door. I wore it on Saturdays when I made Dutch apple pancakes, and on holidays when Karen gave me jobs she trusted me to finish.
I used to joke that she ran the kitchen and I was the hired help.
It wasn’t as funny to me that evening.
I had stood beside her for many Thanksgiving dinners. I had also drifted toward a football game while she found containers for leftovers and wiped gravy off the stove.
Being better than the least helpful person in the family wasn’t much of an accomplishment.
When she came downstairs, I was washing the breakfast pans we had left in the sink.
“You don’t have to look so serious about it,” she said.
“I’m trying to work out where this started.”
She took a clean towel from the drawer.
“We don’t have to solve thirty years tonight.”
“No.”
She dried the smaller pan and put it away.
“But we can stop adding to it.”
Wednesday afternoon, Karen checked us in for the flight and printed our boarding passes.
Then she wrote Derek a note.
He had a spare key to our house. He also had an unfortunate habit of treating an unanswered message as a reason to come over and ask the same question in person.
Karen expected him to try.
She left the note in the center of our kitchen table, weighted with her orange juice glass.
Derek,
We love you. We told you we couldn’t take on the dinner, and we told you about Florida. We have not changed our plans.