“I was talking to Daddy.”
As everyone scatters to do their chores, I clean up the breakfast mess and then sit down to check my email. Amid the usual Pottery Barn, Shopbop, and Amazon notices is a note from none other than Miss Ward.
* * *
To: JDixon
from: PWard
Date: 11/25
Subject: I’m feeling thankful!
Dear Jenny,
As I sit here in my apartment on this beautiful Thanksgiving Day with a bottle of wine and all four Twilight movies to enjoy, I just want to thank you for your hard work and friendship so far this year. I really think we make a great team! Having said that, I need you to be more on the ball with the field trips. We can’t let what happened at the recycling center happen again. Agreed? Great.
Have a nice dinner!
Peggy
* * *
*
Ouch. I really can’t believe she went there.
Peetsa and I chaperoned Tuesday’s field trip and, as predicted by me, the kids had a mass meltdown when they figured out that they weren’t going to the “real dump.”
Thank goodness for Suchafox! He was waiting for us by the front door of the plant, and when he heard the sobbing from inside the bus he came onboard and took charge. Within five minutes, he managed to convince the kids how lucky they were to be here instead of the dump, citing the really bad smell and the giant rats. Luckily, the kids bought this hook, line, and sinker—especially when he said he would show them how to turn a plastic water bottle into a pair of jeans. Suddenly they couldn’t wait to take the tour. Lulu looked so proud.
“P.E. laundry room,” Peetsa mumbled to me as we walked the plant floor. I burst out laughing. Miss Ward gave us a stern look.
At the end of the tour, Don was as good as his word. We sat the kids down in a cafeteria-type room and showed them a video about plastic being made into fabric. Peetsa sat with her son and I noticed Miss Ward sneak out the side door with her cell phone as soon as the movie started. I settled myself in the back of the crowd and leaned back in my chair. That’s when it happened.
Don came and sat beside me.
“Remember being so happy when we got to watch a movie in class?” he whispered.
Calm down, Jen.
“Yeah,” I responded with my usual wit.
He rested his arms on his knees and leaned in so close I could see the light hairs on his ears.
“So…” He smiled.
“So…” I smiled back, trying to remember the last time I sat this near to a man who wasn’t my husband.
“How do you think it’s going?” he whispered.
“I think it’s going great.” I wondered whether we were talking about the same thing. I mean, I was sitting within inches of my high school crush. How much greater could it be?
“Do you think the kids liked the plant? Lulu was really nervous about everyone getting bored.”
“No, they loved it. I loved it.” I hoped my smile reassured him.
“Mom!” Max was standing in front of me.
“What?” I jumped away from Don. The movie was still playing and the kids were quietly watching. I focused on my son. “What’s up?”
“Graydon’s not here.”
Don and I looked at each other and sprang up. Thirty minutes of panic ensued while we put out an APB on Graydon, who had taken it upon himself to look for the bathroom shortly after the movie started. He had left the recycling center and gone to the main building, where the offices were, after judging it the “safest bathroom option.” Luckily, he didn’t run into any peanut butter or airborne dust on his journey, or Shirleen would have had my hide. As it is, I think he got a rash from the soap in the bathroom.
I apologized to Miss Ward profusely and was classy enough not to point out that she was nowhere to be found for the first twenty minutes of Graydon’s disappearance.
And now she throws it at me, on Thanksgiving? I think about a retaliatory email—something biting about drinking wine at ten o’clock in the morning and being a Twi-hard, but in the spirit of the day, I decide to take the high road. Instead, I text Don Happy Thanksgiving and thank him again for all his help with the kids on the field trip. And I am just a little bit thrilled when he texts me right back, Any time!
*
“Ah, that was a fine meal, Mother.” Ron pushes his chair back from the Thanksgiving table and pats his nonexistent belly. Sometimes he likes to pretend we’re an old couple from the 1950s. It’s one of those things that was cute the first five or six times but has since worn thin. I don’t have the heart to tell him he needs some new material.
I have to say, dinner was delicious. Thanksgiving is one of those idiot-proof meals. Just make sure the turkey isn’t overdone, and you’re halfway there.
“You really outdid yourself, girlfriend,” Nina calls from across the table. “Those peas were unbelievable.”
Nina and Chyna always join us for holiday dinners, because we are the closest thing to family that they have in KC. Nina’s parents both died in a horrible boating accident on vacation in the Bahamas. Nina was only eight years old and saw the whole thing from the beach. She went to live with her grandmother in Topeka after that. She doesn’t talk about it much, but she did tell me that when her grandmother died, a lawyer handed her a check for $326,342 as some sort of compensation from the mega-resort where her parents were killed. Apparently, her grandmother had been holding on to it so Nina wouldn’t “spend it on clothes or drugs,” as the will put it. She was twenty-five and completely alone in the world. It was the perfect time for the dashing Sid to sweep her, and her money, off her feet.
“The secret is nutmeg,” I tell her.
“And about a pound of butter,” my mother chimes in. “Sweetheart, I swear you put in more and more every year. Your grandmother would be horrified.”
“But not because of the taste,” I counter. “Granny would be shocked because butter is expensive.”
“That’s true,” my mom agrees. “My goodness, that woman was tight with a dollar. She’d make my father drive twenty miles away to save ten cents on paper towels.”
Nina smiles. I can tell she enjoys the family banter, since she never really had any of her own.
“How is Garth doing?” my mother asks as she starts stacking all the dishes she can reach without getting up. Ron and my dad have wandered back to the television, and the girls and Max have gone to the basement to play Xbox.
“He’s good. I really like him. He’s such a nice guy.”
“What’s he doing today?”
I pause for a moment. “He didn’t say.”
“Well, you should have invited him for dinner today,” my mom admonishes me.
“Mom, I barely know him! He barely knows me. It would have been weird to just randomly invite him to Thanksgiving.”
My mom shakes her head. “I thought I taught you better than that, Jennifer Rose.”
“You never taught me to invite strangers to dinner.”
“He’s not a stranger and he doesn’t have any family in town.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he told me. How much do you know about him?”