During Thanksgiving dinner, my husband looked at me and said, “You can’t do anything.” The whole family burst out laughing. The cranberry sauce was still warm in my hands when my husband destroyed thirty-five years of marriage with seven words. “Maggie always was a peso morto in this family.”
The ceramic serving bowl slipped from my fingers and hit the hardwood floor of our Overland Park dining room with a sound like a gunshot.
Cranberry sauce splattered across the Persian rug Tom’s mother had given us for our tenth anniversary.
The same rug I’d hand-cleaned twice a year for twenty-five years. The same rug where our children had taken their first steps, where we’d unwrapped Christmas presents and celebrated graduations and pretended we were happy.
The laughter started immediately. My son David, thirty-two and too much like his father, snorted into his wineglass.
My daughter Sarah covered her mouth, but I could see her shoulders shaking with suppressed giggles.
Even my youngest, Michael, just turned twenty-seven, was grinning as he helped himself to more stuffing. But it was my daughter-in-law Jennifer who laughed the loudest, throwing her head back like Tom had just delivered the punch line to the funniest joke in the world. “Oh my God, Tom, that’s terrible,” she gasped between giggles.
“But so accurate.”
I stood frozen beside the table I’d spent two days preparing, wearing the apron I’d embroidered with autumn leaves last September, surrounded by the people I’d devoted my entire adult life to serving.
The turkey I’d been basting since four in the morning sat golden and perfect in the center of the table. The homemade rolls were still warm from the oven.
The sweet potato casserole with the marshmallow topping that took three hours to prepare properly steamed gently in my grandmother’s crystal dish. The dish I had promised myself I’d pass down to Sarah someday.
All of it ignored while my family laughed at the joke that was my life.
“Peso morto,” Tom repeated, savoring the Portuguese phrase he’d learned from his golf buddy Carlos. “Dead weight. That’s what you are, Maggie.
Always have been.
Dragging us down with your little hobbies and your crazy ideas.”
The “crazy idea” he was referring to had been mentioned exactly once, tentatively, hopefully, during the appetizer course. A small bed-and-breakfast.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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