May I please speak to Sarah? Or Carol. Or Johnny.

This is her, we’d say. Or him.

She! He! Hands on her hips, my mother would await our revisions. This is s/he, we’d mumble into the receiver.

I’d lost the sound of my mother’s voice shortly after she died. But I could still hear her correcting me.

“It should be I,” I whispered. Fortunately, the live people on either side of me didn’t appear to notice.

“I’d like to propose,” John said, “that we keep the animals locked in this room for the duration of Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Ha,” I said. “Like locked doors have ever worked with my family. Once we locked my brother Michael in the basement with a padlock after he stole some of our Easter candy. And he just climbed out the window and snuck up behind us. It scared the bejeebers out of us, as my brothers used to say.”

John bit his lower lip. He seemed to be doing that a lot since we’d moved in to my childhood home.

“Then maybe,” he said, “we could print out a list of unsafe Thanksgiving foods for animals and post it somewhere central.”

I rolled my eyes as diplomatically as I could. “Sure. Or perhaps we could recite the list after grace just to make sure they don’t miss it.”

John dug in his bathrobe pocket for his phone. “It says here that the bones and skin are the worst, but even too much turkey meat can cause diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration in both dogs and cats.”

“Let’s not forget about salmonella,” I said. “Although if we do, my sister Carol will be only too happy to remind us.”

John stayed glued to his phone. “Onion and garlic, as well as all other members of the allium family, are toxic for dogs and cats. Chocolate’s out, too, of course. Unsweetened canned pumpkin is actually good for them though. As long as the cans are BPA-free.”

“Great,” I said. “There’s still time to ditch the turkey and just open some cans of pumpkin and pass them around. Because I have to tell you that Mother Teresa has been lapping our Thanksgiving plates since early puppyhood, so this is not going to go over well with her.”

Mother Teresa was my brother Michael’s Saint Bernard. His wife Phoebe wasn’t too crazy about the name, but the rest of us applauded it, since it appealed to our immature, lapsed Catholic sensibilities.

“Hmm,” John said. “I suppose we could keep the cats and Horatio in here, and let Mother Teresa out long enough for a quick lap around the table. Pun intended.”