Works and Days

Thanksgiving

Part five

Kristen Keiller stretched and rose from her bed. Reese was snoring lightly on his stomach, his hands clutching the pillow. Whatever people might say about the two of them, it couldn’t be denied that with the exception of Patti’s strange parents, they were the only people in the house who knew how to keep a marriage together. He didn’t look much older to her than he had when they’d first met. Kristen wondered if she did. She wondered for what seemed a long time before her bladder reminded her of why she was up, and she pulled the light housecoat on over her nightgown and left her bed to go down the hall to the bathroom. As she was entering, she heard noise from across the hall.

There was a fierce growling and then she heard a stifled voice crying, “Oh God, Finn, you feel so damned good inside of me. Finn! Ooooh, Finn!”

And now Kristin could hear the bed springs creaking.

“Daddy!” Meg sighed. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

“Good God,” Kristin muttered, closing the bathroom door and preparing to relieve herself.

 

In the darkness of the living room, Thom lay on his back on the couch, gripping the blankets around his neck and looking at the ceiling while he heard the thumping and the bed springs creaking frantically. He was sure it was Finn. But what if it was Kristin and Reese? They had to... sometimes. The toilet flushed. He wondered if Patti and her Chuck ever did it. Was it like that? He pushed Liz out of his mind and jumped to himself and Patti. Once upon a time... There had been passion. Half laughing, half oversexed by the sounds above him, Thom threw together the most ridiculous pictures of people fucking. He realized, suddenly, his hands were in his jogging pants, and a little afraid, he pulled his hands out.

He did it just in time.

“Thom?” he heard the whisper and thought he was imagining. Then he heard it again.

“Hello?” Thom whispered into the air.

“It’s your mother,” said the British accent.

Thom sat up. His mother was standing over the other end of the couch.

“Scoot your feet back,” she said, the accent fading into something more Appalachian, and he did, and his mother sat down.

“Oh, Tommy, we never talk. Don’t scowl like that. You’re so handsome until you scowl.”

The ceiling stopped thumping.

“Thank you,” Kathleen Lewis said to the quiet ceiling.

 “A mother can only do her best. She wants her children to come out... Happy, wise.” Thom saw his mother shrug in the dark. “In the end I could only do my best.”

“Your best was more than good enough,” Thom told her.

“When you were a little boy, I had your father—who was just another little boy himself—to take care of, and Kristin—who was spoiled and mean and embarrassed of everything. And I would feed you. You were the sweetest baby. It was easy to forget you had needs. Until I’d smell you.”

Thom looked at his mother, waiting for a point.

“You would crap in your diapers and never say a word. You’d just sit there and not make a complaint. For the longest time I thought something might be wrong with you. But you were just... not able to express yourself, afraid to or something. All through your growing up you never ever said what you needed to. You were always such a closed book. And then we came up here to live with your uncle. And although you never said anything, I knew how you felt. About where you’d come from, where we were. I knew it because you are the only little boy I’ve ever known of who could lose a Southern accent.”

“Mom—”

“Just listen to me, Thomas. When you found Patti I was so happy. I fell in love with her. She excited you. She had this hold over you no one else ever did. But I worried because she was an open book. She was full of passions and I wondered if one day she wouldn’t exasperate you... or you exasperate her. And Thomas, I’m going to stop talking after this, but I have to say, you have an amazing capacity for being in pain and smiling through it, of not being able to let people love you, and if you still love Patricia, you need to tell her that before it’s too late.”

Kathleen patted her son’s cheek, kissed him and said, “Goodnight, Baby Boy,” and then got up and went back upstairs, leaving Thom to sit in the dark and wonder.

 

Patti was up only a little before the sun. The kitchen was filled with a weak grey light. No Felice and Jackie this morning. Well, there would be a Jackie later. In her hands she carried the old silver coffeemaker Mom had brought from Chicago. There was a tradition. The first large pot of coffee was communal. After that the regular coffee pot was put out in the living room for the men, and the women set to the serious work of preparing the dinner.

Russell, Kristin, Reese, John, the three boys, Jackie—which meant Chip, Finn and the stray woman of the week, Mom and Dad, Kathleen and Denise, who was frequently so bitter that she passed out of memory, and Thom—who needed to pass out of memory, or maybe just pass out. Not that many really. And that much food was not really needed and really not that much help to prepare it. Seven women in the kitchen at once when it was said that more than one cook spoiled the soup, and Patti realized that most of them didn’t really do anything. It was a time to talk, to be. It was good to be with the girls, to feel like a woman among women every once in a while. Good and discomfiting at the same time because there was really no telling what one of them would ask.

As she scooped the coffee into the basket and turned on the faucet, listening to the shoot of cold water hit the tin sink, Patti realized that she was even happy about Kristin and Meg. Somehow all the women being here mattered. She wondered if the men felt this sitting around watching the football game. She wondered what Russell felt. Part of her wondered if he shouldn’t have stayed at Chayne’s house for Thanksgiving.

The kitchen door swung open and it was Thom, hair rumpled, in rumpled tee shirt and boxers, face rumpled as well, bottom lip jutting out.

“Good morning, Thom.”

She didn’t feel the way around her soon to be ex-husband she expected to. She felt uncomfortable, awkward.

His “Good morning!” was marred by a yawn. She couldn’t really tell how he felt as he shuffled to the sink, took out a glass and filled it with water before she could fill the coffee maker.

“My God, Thomas, you look horrible!”

Patti never thought she’d be grateful to see her older sister-in-law. Her hair was in a white snood, she was certainly wearing make up, and Patti thought to herself that Kristin Keillor must never look bad.

“Reese kept croaking about how he needs a glass of water,” Kristin excused her presence, waiting for Patti to fill up the coffeemaker before filling her own glass. “Men are such babies.”

“Give Reese a break,” Thom told her, finishing off his glass and going to the little side bathroom from the kitchen. “You act like he’s so incompetent,” Thom shouted back and the two women could hear him pissing. Kristin refrained from drinking her water at this sound, and the coffeemaker began to percolate.

“It’s not Reese. It’s all men.” she said. “Men are incompetent. My husband’s a man. Therefore my husband is incompetent. I believe it’s an Aristotelian syllogism,” Kristin shrugged and went up the back stair.

“I believe it’s an Aristotelian syllogism,” Patti heard Thom mimic and almost laughed. The toilet flushed. No one could piss as long as Thom.

“Bitch,” she heard Thom murmur, making sure to look around for his older sister before pronouncing the judgment.

“Patti, wake me up when the coffee’s finished.”

“Wake up your own damned self,” she muttered, reaching into her housecoat for her Bensen and Hedges.

“PMS must be in the water,” Thom muttered, shambling back through the dining room as the swinging door closed on him.

Patti was going to ignore this, but suddenly she was seized by a fit of rage, and she reached into the drawer beside the sink, pulled out the metal soup ladle, and charged to the living room, bashing Thom square in the back of the head before he could get back on the sofa.

“What the fuck!” he groaned clutching his head.

“That,” Patti said, “is for thinking you know something about PMS.”

And then she turned around and charged back into the kitchen, the door swinging behind her.

 

By nine o’clock they could get down to business. The men were gone from the kitchen. Jackie had finally come, and Patti was through half a pack of cigarettes. They were finishing touches needed for the cakes, Black Forest and simple yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Kristin had insisted on making another cake herself.

“It’s to compensate for her lack of homemaking ability when she’s actually at home,” Jackie explained cracking open a beer.

“At least I have a home to make—” Kristin began.

“Girls,” Kathleen chided. “Girls. And Jackie, it’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

“Mom, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

“Did Chip teach you that?” Kristin asked, her eyes staring grimly at the bowl she worked the mixer in. “Or can he tell time? Speaking of time, What time did he finally get back to you? Or did he get back to you?”

“Kristin,” Kathleen chided in a drawl. Patti said nothing. She was going over her to-do list. The sweet potato pudding had been put together last night. It needed to be baked a little before dinner, along with the macaroni, two kinds—Grandma Mc.Larchlahn’s recipe, and Kathleen’s. That meant they’d have to start baking almost immediately and use the microwave frequently along with all the heating trays in the house.

“Oh, Mom, I’m not worried about Kristin,” Jackie confided. “If I hadn’t had sex since the last ice age—”

“Oh, I’m sure Chip grabs you by the hair and throws you on your stomach!” Kristin was beating the cake batter all the more mercilessly.

“He doesn’t, but I’m sure it’s exactly what you need.”

“Oh, how would you know what I need?” Kristin demanded, scooping the batter into the first cake pan. “And who are you to inquire into the life of my bedroom?”

“There’s more life in a morgue than in your bedroom,” Jackie said.

Kristin clamped her mouth shut and continued to pour the batter into the cake pans.

“And it just proves...” Kristin thumped more batter into the last pan, “that you don’t know anything—about what makes a relationship—which is why, I suppose, you’ve never had a real one.”

“If the choice is between me being single, and me living up in the North Pole with a man who’s so whipped all he can say is yes dear, no dear, harder? Faster? I think I’ll take what I have now,” Jackie said.

Kristin prepared to say something, but just then, for the first time, Patti heard her own sister speak.

“Are you always this much of a bitch?” Denise asked, grating carrots.

Kristin blinked at her.

“I’ll never understand,” Denise went on. “I gave my husband everything. He took it and left. You give yours grief. He stays. I guess life is random.”

Kristin continued staring at her sister-in-law’s sister. They were the same age. Denise stopped grating the carrots and finally said, “By the way, you forgot to grease those pans. If you don’t take all the batter out you’re gonna make a really shitty cake.”

“Denise!” Sara reprimanded her daughter as she entered the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” Denise cleared her throat and kept slicing. “A really fucked up cake.”

 

“I had thought we could all go down to the fishing hole,” Frank said, readjusting his glasses.

“Granddad, there isn’t a fishing hole around here,” Russell said, taking a sip from his coffee mug.

“Russell, there’s Lake Chicktaw,” Thom reminded him.

“Nope,” Russell said, negating the lake’s very existence.

Thom didn’t pursue it as the UnderDog balloon came slowly floated past Macy’s department store.

“Is there even such a thing as male bonding?” Russell wondered.

“I think that we’re having male bonding right now,” his Grandfather said, preparing to wax profound. “Wherever men come together to share minds, there is bonding, a great fusion of souls in one common unity....”

Russell tuned his grandfather out, and Finn came down the stairs, just pulling a tee shirt over his hairy chest.

“Good morning, peoples!” he murmured.

“Young man, you’re getting up awfully late,” said Frank.

“I didn’t go to sleep till awfully late,” Finn said. “I had business to attend to.”

Russell watched his uncle thrust his groin in and out and wink at them all before putting back on his shades and sticking an unlit cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

John shook his head and told Ross, “Why don’t you and the boys run into the kitchen. Are we all going to Mass this morning?”

“I think so,” said Thom. “We usually do.”

“I’ll ask Patti,” John said.

“Russell, I didn’t know you drank coffee,” Thom said.

“I didn’t,” Russell said, a little surprised at his cup himself. “Everyone else was doing it, so...” he shrugged. “And I didn’t know your were smoking again.”

“Everyone else was so,” Thom copied his son. “But don’t you start. It’ll stunt your growth.”

“Was Mom hitting you in the back of the head with a ladle what stunted yours?”

Thom’s eyes flew wide open.

“It’s all over the house. You told John. He told me. Aunt Kristin says you probably had it coming,” Russell said, getting up and going into the kitchen.

He and John were both there when Meg came down the back stairs, still in a nightie that ended right below her hips, cold cream plastering her face.

“Good morning!” she cried.

United in disgust, Jackie and Kristin both turned a look on Meg.

“I’m ready to help now. What should I do?” she demanded.

“Uh...” Patti drew a blank.

“You could put some damn clothes on for one,” Denise said.

Patti said, “You can restir the macaroni before I put it in the oven.”

Sara looked at her daughter.

“She has to do something,” Patti muttered.

“Dad wants to know if we’re going to church or not?” said Russell before John could speak.

“Of course we’re going to church,” Sara said sharply. “It’s Thanksgiving. We have to thank God. That’s what it’s for.”

“I don’t even know if there is a Mass,” Jackie said. “Last year we didn’t have one.”

“I’ll have Russell call Chayne,” Patti decided.

“Sometimes,” she confided in Jackie, “I think Thanksgiving exists just to make you thankful for the other three hundred-sixty four days of the year you don’t have to go through all this.”

“Three-hundred sixty-three,” Kathleen said. “Don’t forget Christmas.”

“But there’re presents on Christmas,” Jackie said.

“You’d better call the church—or call Chayne,” said Patti, “to find out what time everything is.”

“I have to know,” Meg said, approaching the macaroni as Sara eyed her dubiously, and the younger woman threw her elbows on the kitchen table. “What is Thom like?”

“Excuse me?” said Patti.

“I mean is he....” Meg smiled and blushed, “endowed? I wanted to know if it was genetic. A Lewis thing. Because Finn is huge!” Meg made an impossibly large gap between her hands indicating Finn’s size, and Kathleen’s eyes opened as Sara, sensing violence, reached over, moving the cutlery from her fellow mother-in-law’s reach while calmly finishing off the icing for a Bundt cake.

Patti smiled and said, “I don’t know if it’s genetic. Jackie, how big is your penis?”

“Enormous,” her sister-in-law replied, and continued smoking.

 

 

“No answer,” Russell told John as he put down the phone.

“We’ll just go over and see if he’s home,” John said. “He’s probably busy planning his own Thanksgiving.”

“That’s right. Half of Lothrop County’s supposed to be coming.”

They drove over and found half of Lothrop County double parked before Chayne’s house and the house next door. Running up the stairs and entering the front room,  they found Chayne in a suit, walking to and fro his house while cousins milled about putting out China and laying out insults.

“Of course there’s a Mass today,” Chayne looked at Russell incredulously. “In about an hour, and you’ve got a solo in it. Remember?”

Russell’s eyes widened. “Oh my...”

“There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” Chayne reminded him.

“Twelve o’clock Mass! I forgot,” Russell slapped his head.

“Well, now you remember. So now get dressed.”

Russell nodded his head, kissed Chayne quickly, and was turning to leave.

 “Good to see you, Chayne,” John said.

“Good to be seen, John McLlarchlahn.”

“How are things over here?”

“Peaceful,” Chayne said, fastening a cufflink.

Beyond them they could hear Cousin Janna wonder, “How do I keep getting pregnant?” and Cousin Pethane answer, “Probably by being such a ho.”

“Well, most of the time,” Chayne modified.