I started loading it into the foil trays I found in the cabinet above the refrigerator.
Karen came to the kitchen doorway and watched me for a moment with an expression cycling through confusion and then alarm.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m packing up dinner,” I said.
“Rick.”
“I heard you tell my father he wasn’t welcome in his son’s house on Thanksgiving because he smells like the work he’s spent his life doing,” I said, still moving, still steady. “I’m not sitting down to a dinner that was built on that.”
“So you’re going to ruin everything.”
I slid the sweet potatoes into a tray and pressed the foil down around the edges. “I’m going to go have Thanksgiving with my father. What you do with the evening is up to you.”
She said a number of things after that. That I was being childish. That her parents were going to be mortified. That I could not simply take the entire Thanksgiving dinner and leave. That I was making a huge mistake. I listened to all of it while I worked, and I did not argue with any of it, because arguing requires a belief that the other person might say something that will change your mind, and I had already understood, in the dining room, that my mind was not going to change.
The turkey went into a large foil roasting pan I found under the sink, the kind you use for exactly this kind of transport. I covered it carefully. I stacked the trays, carried them to the truck in two trips, and then went back for the pie.
