Thanksgiving

“Workin’ and sleepin’,” he replies, with a hand inside his leather jacket. He’d overlooked her cheap shoes sitting in the entrance hallway, so she pretends not to notice that he’s checking his stash.

Outside, they light up.

The smell’s the same as always, but for some reason a particular curl of smoke makes him think of the firing range.

He had been nineteen. Of all the privates, he had been the one chosen to take the shot.

“The battalion commander’s watching,” his sergeant hissed. “You will not miss.”

He hadn’t. His round ripped across the field and tore through the paper target. He had thought about picking up the spent casing and hiding it in his cargo pocket. He could have passed it around the dinner table that year, when he went home for Thanksgiving.

She’s coughing the way she does when the air gets cold and dry. She shouldn’t be smoking, but her asthma’s got nothing to do with him.

She’s talking, has been the entire time. He has barely heard a word, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing she tells him every year--how Rodney’s going to get his promotion and they’ll have the money to move up to Cincinnati where she can get a better job, in a bank, maybe.

“Workin’ and sleepin’,” he mutters. “This wasn’t the plan,” and she must hear him, because she sighs.

They stand a while longer under the pallid Kentucky sky, he with his hands in his pockets, where a warm brass casing isn’t. Earlier he’d said he would carve the turkey, so they slip through the back door, treading dirt into their mother’s kitchen.

Copyright © 2007
 971 MENU