Thanksgiving, Short Stories

By Jack Sutor

Thanksgiving is a book about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. A lonely twelve-year-old girl grows up amid wide responsibilities, a former Manhattan murder detective tries to do right by his estranged children, a wife allows her husband a night out with an old friend, a young man's act of gratitude goes horribly wrong, a social worker makes an alarming call on her client, an old man trying to be decent to younger family members runs afoul of everyone, and a woman learns to turn a holiday by the sea into a family goodbye.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647010140

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Thanksgiving, Short Stories

Jack Sutor

Copyright © 2019 Jack Sutor

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2019

ISBN 978-1-64701-011-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64701-014-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

A Nice Girl Like You

At the Dewdrop Inn

A Little Variety

Gratitude

A Visit

A Yellow Ribbon

Thanksgiving

This book is for Matt and Teddy, for whom I am very grateful.

A Nice Girl Like You

Years later she remembered it was then that the lonely feeling started. She was eleven, walking with her father on Main Street in Vacherie, Louisiana. A man came up to them and started yelling at her father about some money and called him a lot of filthy names. She stood there in the white heat of August with the hostile men, their faces a few inches apart. Her father’s face was red with the glow of whiskey, and the other man’s hot with anger. Theresa was used to anger by then, but the other man’s was the cruel, scornful anger of contempt. It was demeaning and withering, and it terrified her. She stood there while her father swayed and blinked in the heat.

She was at eye level with the other man’s shirt pocket, and she could see his chest trembling beneath the wet cotton. She looked up at her father’s damp face and hair and felt the loneliness spread inside her like a stain.

At the time, she only wanted to get out of the sun and wash her father’s face. She wanted to comb his hair and shave his beard and pat his chin gently with some cool blue lotion and give him some sweet ice tea. She would have a big glass of cherry Kool-Aid. Then they would go into town and have a nice lunch in a cool place with clean tablecloths. A cheerful waitress would stay and chat while they ate. It would be fun and organized and predictable. She would feel safe.

Then the man slapped her father, who dug his nails into her shoulder to keep himself from toppling over backward. The pain brought her back again into the heat and loneliness.

The following year, her father knocked a Mexican off a bridge in an argument over beer. The Mexican, who was drunk, apparently drowned. The body was never found. The sheriff tried to determine whether a Mexican really had been thrown off the bridge. Theresa’s father and his companions swore it was a lie, and the Mexican laborers swore that it had happened. While the case was being investigated, Theresa’s father was stabbed one night in town during a fight with another Mexican over cigarettes. He was kept in jail until he could be tried for the bridge incident. A jury found him guilty and the judge sent him to prison for seven years.

With the help of a caseworker, Theresa packed her things, and those of her younger brothers, into two big cardboard boxes. The three-room house where they had lived would be turned into a storage shed by the farm owner, for whom their father, when he was sober, had worked. The owner and his wife had always been kind, and Theresa would miss them. They had given the children gifts at Christmas and Easter; the same sort of toys they gave their own grandchildren. It was the owner who was paying for their transportation to Washington, DC, where their mother lived.

The caseworker sealed the boxes with brown, glossy tape and bound them with twine. She inscribed their mother’s name on each in big childish letters with a Magic Marker. Theresa watched all this in silence, occasionally tossing her head to one side to clear her dark hair from her eyes. The young caseworker, chatting pleasantly, tried to engage her in conversation. Flies flew in and out of the open windows. A neighbor’s dog barked in the distance.

The caseworker said they had better leave to get to town in time for the bus. Theresa was seven when her father had moved them in there; Jerry, three, and Philippe, two. On this day, six years later, the children walked straight across the yard and got into the caseworker’s car without a glance behind them. Before they turned the curve and began to parallel the river, Theresa Marie Gericault could have looked back for a final glimpse of the only home she could remember. But the boys had begun to argue, and she had yelled at them in irritation, and no one looked back.

They passed the lane leading down to the tenant house where her father’s great-uncle lived with his wife. They were the children’s only relatives besides their mother. The caseworker had approached them about taking Theresa and her brothers. The great-uncle’s wife was in favor of it and did what she could to convince her husband, but he would never drive her into town for appointments. When the caseworker came to his house and could find him, he was never sober enough to discuss anything and would order her to leave. His wife had gone up the road repeatedly to use a neighbor’s telephone to discuss the children with the caseworker and farm owner’s wife. The owner was willing to help financially until they could investigate social security and veterans’ benefits. Nobody could convince the great-uncle to cooperate, however, and the efforts had ended.

At the bus station, the caseworker, their entire departure committee, spoke at length with the bus driver, gave each child a peck on the cheek, and said goodbye. Theresa climbed onto the ponderous bus, clutching a bag of sandwiches, doughnuts, and oranges. The excited boys, shouting and shoving, came along behind her. As the bus glided solemnly through streets she was leaving forever, Theresa smoothed down her hair and cradled the big bag of food like a baby against her chest.

She turned her head in time to see two schoolmates, talking and smiling, standing with their bicycles in front of Target’s store. One of them had invited Theresa to her birthday party a year ago. Theresa had been too frightened to go or to mention it to her father. In seconds they were lost in the streaks of roadside color as the bus gained speed.

Through the smokey glass, she watched the lush countryside vanish behind her. The wide, flat fields glided by, here and there interrupted by ponds and stands of tall pines. She could trace the distant river by its unbroken line of graceful willows. Great white houses loomed in trees at the ends of lanes. The boys waved frantically at people in the yards of trackside houses, but nobody waved back. Theresa wondered whether the passengers could be seen behind the gray glass. She decided that they could, and that people would have waved if she and the boys had been on a train.

She watched a small house go by with a green pickup truck in front. It reminded her of the truck her father’s friends used to drive. They came out from town and often stayed the whole weekend, drinking and sleeping on the floor. On one such occasion, Jerry had disappeared for most of one whole night, and she could not awaken her father or interest anyone else in looking for him. Finally, she had found him herself, asleep in the front seat of the green truck. On such weekends, there was generally food in the house, as long as the men had money.

She remembered the time the wife of one of the men had come out to the house to find her husband and bring him home. The enormous young wife sat in the back seat of a friend’s car with her babies all Sunday afternoon and shouted for her husband. She shouted that they needed money, that he had to come home, that if he missed work on Monday he would lose his job. She shouted that she had to promise her friend twenty dollars to drive her out there. From the front seat, the friend shouted that she wasn’t accepting more than ten dollars, and the wife could use the other ten to buy her babies’ milk, since it seemed that nobody else was going to do it. Against the advice of her father’s friends, the young husband had finally gone out to the car, sheepish and drunk, and gotten in beside his wife. The wife’s friend tried to start the car, but it took awhile. The whole time, the young wife was screaming at her husband, and he was coughing and shaking his head. Theresa and her brothers watched and listened from the front steps. In later years, Theresa would close her eyes in trying moments and hear the fat mother screaming and the babies crying.

Television aerials on rooftops reminded her of the time her father had brought home a big color television. They had no aerial, and the reception was so poor they could barely see the picture.

After a week or so their father had smashed the screen in anger when the boys fought over which cartoon show they would watch.

Suddenly her heart began to race, and she shifted uneasily in the deep bus seat. A familiar odor had pervaded the cool air of the long bus. Someone had opened some whiskey. Because of the height of the seats, she could see few of the passengers, but she decided that it must be the older man in the denim jacket and cowboy hat who kept going back to the restroom. His face was the right color, but the motion of the bus made it hard for her to decide about his walk.

The boys had gone to sleep across the aisle from her. Unlike her own dark, thin sharpness, they were blond