“Don’t worry,” Billy Jr. said. “I already called to check—Boston Market’s open till six.”

“I’ve got a can of tuna in my back pocket just in case,” Carol’s husband Dennis said.

That reminded me I’d forgotten to put out our prized vintage Chicken of the Sea salt and pepper shakers. The shakers were two little ceramic fish—tuna, I presumed, loosely interpreted—one yellow, one turquoise, each maybe three inches long by two inches tall. My grandmother on my mother’s side had saved her Chicken of the Sea labels religiously until she’d collected enough to buy the set. When we visited her at her walk-up apartment in Holyoke, the smell of old wood greeted us in the foyer, and we raced up three flights of stairs for the privilege of shaking those tiny fish first.

Later, spurred by a Brady Bunch episode where the kids decide to cash in their S&H Green Stamps—the Brady girls want to buy a sewing machine and the Brady boys want a boat—we helped our mother paste stamps into Green Stamps Quick Saver books. Each page held 50 stamps, and we were sure we’d have an Admiral 17-inch Solid State Color TV in no time. But 150 books of Green Stamps proved to be too much delayed gratification for the Hurlihy kids, so we settled on a Pillow Top Vinyl Hassock for 5½ books. We fought over the sticky russet-colored square for a week or two, then forgot all about it.

I found the salt and pepper fish in the third cabinet I tried. I shook some salt over my left shoulder for good luck. Shook some over my right just in case I’d remembered the wrong shoulder. I made a place for the tiny treasures in the hodgepodge of dishes on the dining room table.

“Where did you end up cooking the turkey anyway?” Christine asked when I got back to the kitchen.

“Teachers’ room at school,” I said. “Not that it’s any of your beeswax.”

“Just tell me it didn’t fall out of the car on the way,” Carol said.

A wave of laughter broke over the kitchen.

“Ohmigod,” I said when I could talk again. I turned to loop in John and Polly. “So, one year we were driving to our dad’s parents’ house in Worcester, and for some reason we were bringing the cooked turkey with us—”

“We were all jammed into that old station wagon with the fake wood strips on the sides,” Michael said.

“Watch it, sonny boy,” our dad said. “I’ll have you know that was real wood on those panels.”

“Right,” Carol said. “From a rare Alpine plastic tree.”

“God, I wish I had that station wagon now,” Michael said.

Michael’s wife Phoebe crossed her eyes.

“No seatbelts, of course,” I said. “And I was holding the turkey on my lap.”

“You were not,” Christine said. “I was holding the turkey.”