“Granma does most of the cooking here,” I tell her.

“That’s because I’m working.”

“I wasn’t complaining. You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I mind,” she says. Her voice is the voice she uses when she wants me to feel bad about something, because I’m disappointing her, or maybe just making her sad. “Come and cook with us. It’s Thanksgiving.”

“In a minute,” I say, and go back to my book. Mom stands up at last, and the bed shifts, and I hear her footsteps on the old wooden boards. She closes the door behind her. The room feels empty again.

For a minute I just lie there with the book on my lap. I’m propped up on the pillows, and there’s a shaft of sunlight, coming from the window near Mom’s bed, that falls on my lap. It’s another sunny day that seems even sunnier because of the yellow leaves. But I’m not reading anymore; my concentration is broken. In New York, our kitchen window overlooked 85th Street, but if you put your head out, you could just about see Central Park. With the window open, you could hear the traffic on Central Park West. It was the one place in the house Mom never cared about making a mess. Once I asked her why not, and she said, “Because your father leaves me alone in here. This is my territory,” and without really thinking about it, I get out of bed.

I’m still in pajamas but that doesn’t matter. It’s warm in the house, and I put on some slippers and go into the kitchen. For the rest of the day, that’s what we do—make messes. We make cranberry sauce and two kinds of stuffing, and Granma bakes a kind of sweet potato pie. It’s really more of a soup, with canned pineapples and marshmallows bobbing around in it. The turkey’s already in the oven, but every half hour Mom lets me pull it out and with a baster squirt whatever juice is lying at the bottom of the pan over the bird.

It gets really hot in the kitchen, and at one point Granma has to sit down. Her face looks red. She has wispy gray hair and a few whiskers around her mouth as well—it’s easy to see them in the heat, because they stand out. I don’t like to look at her swollen hand. It feels like it must hurt, even though Granma says it doesn’t; she says it’s just swollen. Around four o’clock, Mom asks me to set the table and Granma pulls out a kitchen chair, carries it next to the sink, and climbs on it.

“What are you doing?” Mom asks.

But she doesn’t answer—she’s got a wooden spoon in her mouth, and she’s rummaging through one of the cupboards over the counter and steps down again with a tablecloth in her hand. “Use this,” she says. It’s covered in yellow roses, with thorns and green leaves.

Mom helps me drag out the table in the living room. We lay the cloth over it, and then I get Granma’s best china from the mahogany closet next to the window. I’ve never opened it before—it’s full of plates, teacups, jugs, and serving bowls, stuff like that. Old dusty bottles of alcohol stand on the bottom shelf.