Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“Or just out to a McDonald’s, maybe.”

“I don’t think so,” Macon said.

Porter’s children arrived the evening before Thanksgiving, traveling by car because Danny, the oldest, had just got his driver’s license. That worried Porter considerably. He paced the floor from the first moment they could be expected. “I don’t know where June’s brain is,” he said. “Letting a sixteen-year-old boy drive all the way from Washington the first week he has his license! With his two little sisters in the car! I don’t know how her mind works.”

To make it worse, the children were almost an hour late. When Porter finally saw their headlights, he rushed out the door and down the steps well ahead of the others. “What kept you?” he cried.

Danny unfurled himself from the car with exaggerated nonchalance, yawning and stretching, and shook Porter’s hand as a kind of afterthought while turning to study his tires. He was as tall as Porter now but very thin, with his mother’s dark coloring. Behind him came Susan, fourteen — just a few months older than Ethan would have been. It was lucky she was so different from Ethan, with her cap of black curls and her rosy cheeks. This evening she wore jeans and hiking boots and one of those thick down jackets that made young people look so bulky and graceless. Then last came Liberty. What a name, Macon always thought. It was an invention of her mother’s — a flighty woman who had run away from Porter with a hippie stereo salesman eight and a half years ago and discovered immediately afterward that she was two months pregnant. Ironically, Liberty was the one who looked most like Porter. She had fair, straight hair and a chiseled face and she was dressed in a little tailored coat. “Danny got lost,” she said severely. “What a dummy.” She kissed Porter and her aunt and uncles, but Susan wandered past them in a way that let everyone know she had outgrown all that.

“Oh, isn’t this nice?” Rose said. “Aren’t we going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving?” She stood on the sidewalk wrapping her hand in her apron, perhaps to stop herself from reaching out to Danny as he slouched toward the house. It was dusk, and Macon, happening to glance around, saw the grown-ups as pale gray wraiths — four middle-aged unmarried relatives yearning after the young folks.

For supper they had carry-out pizza, intended to please the children, but Macon kept smelling turkey. He thought at first it was his imagination. Then he noticed Danny sniffing the air. “Turkey? Already?” Danny asked his aunt.

“I’m trying this new method,” she said. “It’s supposed to save energy. You set your oven extremely low and cook your meat all night.”

“Weird.”

After supper they watched TV — the children had never seemed to warm to cards — and then they went to bed. But in the middle of the night, Macon woke with a start and gave serious thought to that turkey. She was cooking it till tomorrow? At an extremely low temperature? What temperature was that, exactly?

He was sleeping in his old room, now that his leg had mended. Eventually he nudged the cat off his chest and got up. He made his way downstairs in the dark, and he crossed the icy kitchen linoleum and turned on the little light above the stove. One hundred and forty degrees, the oven dial read. “Certain death,” he told Edward, who had tagged along behind him. Then Charles walked in, wearing large, floppy pajamas. He peered at the dial and sighed. “Not only that,” he said, “but this is a stuffed turkey.”

“Wonderful.”

“Two quarts of stuffing. I heard her say so.”

“Two quarts of teeming, swarming bacteria.”

“Unless there’s something to this method we don’t understand.”

“We’ll ask her in the morning,” Macon said, and they went back to bed.

In the morning, Macon came down to find Rose serving pancakes to the children. He said, “Rose, what exactly is it you’re doing to this turkey?”

“I told you: slow heat. Jam, Danny, or syrup?”

“Is that it ?” Macon asked.

“You’re dripping,” Rose said to Liberty. “What, Macon? See, I read an article about slow-cooked beef and I thought, well, if it works with beef it must work with turkey too so I—”

“It might work with beef but it will murder us with turkey,” Macon told her.

“But at the end I’m going to raise the temperature!”

“You’d have to raise it mighty high. You’d have to autoclave the thing.”

“You’d have to expose it to a nuclear flash,” Danny said cheerfully.

Rose said, “Well, you’re both just plain wrong. Who’s the cook here, anyhow? I say it’s going to be delicious.”

Maybe it was, but it certainly didn’t look it. By dinnertime the breast had caved in and the skin was all dry and dull. Rose entered the dining room holding the turkey high as if in triumph, but the only people who looked impressed were those who didn’t know its history — Julian and Mrs. Barrett, one of Rose’s old people. Julian said, “Ah!” and Mrs. Barrett beamed. “I just wish my neighbors could see this,” Julian said. He wore a brass-buttoned navy blazer, and he seemed to have polished his face.

“Well, there may be a little problem here,” Macon said.

Rose set the turkey down and glared at him.

“Of course, the rest of the meal is excellent,” he said. “Why, we could fill up on the vegetables alone! In fact I think I’ll do that. But the turkey…”

“It’s pure poison,” Danny finished for him.

Julian said, “Come again?” but Mrs. Barrett just smiled harder.

“We think it may have been cooked at a slightly inadequate temperature,” Macon explained.

“It was not!” Rose said. “It’s perfectly good.”

“Maybe you’d rather just stick to the side dishes,” Macon told Mrs. Barrett. He was worried she might be deaf.

But she must have heard, for she said, “Why, perhaps I will,” never losing her smile. “I don’t have much of an appetite anyhow,” she said.

“And I’m a vegetarian,” Susan said.

“So am I,” Danny said suddenly.

“Oh, Macon, how could you do this?” Rose asked. “My lovely turkey! All that work!”

“I think it looks delicious,” Julian said.

“Yes,” Porter told him, “but you don’t know about the other times.”

“Other times?”

“Those were just bad luck,” Rose said.

“Why, of course!” Porter said. “Or economy. You don’t like to throw things away; I can understand that! Pork that’s been sitting too long or chicken salad left out all night…”

Rose sat down. Tears were glazing her eyes. “Oh,” she said, “you’re all so mean! You don’t fool me for an instant; I know why you’re doing this. You want to make me look bad in front of Julian.”

“Julian?”

Julian seemed distressed. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket but then went on holding it.

“You want to drive him off! You three wasted your chances and now you want me to waste mine, but I won’t do it. I can see what’s what. Just listen to any song on the radio; look at any soap opera. Love is what it’s all about. On soap operas everything revolves around love. A new person comes to town and right away the question is, who’s he going to love? Who’s going to love him back? Who’ll lose her mind with jealousy? Who’s going to ruin her life? And you want to make me miss it!”

“Well, goodness,” Macon said, trying to sort this out.

“You know perfectly well there’s nothing wrong with that turkey. You just don’t want me to stop cooking for you and taking care of this house, you don’t want Julian to fall in love with me.”

“Do what?”

But she scraped her chair back and ran from the room. Julian sat there with his mouth open.