“Okay, I’ll try to remember,” I murmured as we walked into the house.
It smelled delicious, and I was hungrier than I could remember being in a long time. I had always eaten well in my life, but there wasn’t anything greater than a home-cooked meal. Especially a mother’s home-cooked meal.
Katherine at pulled a beautiful turkey out of the oven, and she already had about six side dishes on the table. There was no way the four of us would come close to eating all the food that she had prepared, but I sure as hell was going to give it a try.
“Katherine, this dinner smells amazing. Is there anything I can help with?”
“You can cut the turkey if you’d like. Bob hates doing it, but I make him do it every year.”
I didn’t know how to cut a turkey, but I certainly didn’t want to look like a rich, spoiled kid in front of Cassidy. Every grown man should at least know how to cut a turkey, or so I thought to myself as I grabbed the giant knife that Katherine handed me.
Cassidy stayed with me in the kitchen while her mother made her way to the other room to wait for us to serve the cut up turkey. Slowly, I let the knife saw into the side of the turkey and it returned me a large chunk of white meat. This didn’t seem all that hard after all. I just needed to saw down each side of the cooked bird and put the pieces of turkey onto the platter that was set out.
Cassidy seemed amused as she watched me cut through the first few pieces of meat. Her smile was brilliantly white and her giggles just as distracting to me as I tried to look professional in my turkey-cutting skills.
Even though I was technically a vegan, I didn’t have moral obligations that kept me from eating meat, or cutting it up for that matter. I really just couldn’t do it because I hadn’t ever seen someone cut a turkey before, and I had no frame of reference for where to start with the process.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” she finally asked me.
“I know what I’m doing. Just slice the meat off of the bone.”
“There’s a little more to it than that. You’ve got to make the pieces small enough that people can actually e
at them. If you leave just large pieces, we will likely need to turn into barbarians and eat that meat with our hands.”
“I’m good with my hands.” I laughed as I held up a disproportionally sized slice of turkey.
“You can show me sometime,” she teased me.
I really couldn’t tell if she was serious or totally joking, but I was hard at just the possibility. Somewhere down the road could be after I got out of treatment. That would work great and made the most sense. But I suspected after treatment, Cassidy wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. She probably had guys hitting on her every round of patients that came through the doors.
By the time I reached the middle of the bird, I was basically just pulling off pieces of the meat and putting it on the place. So, basically there were giant, thick slices of turkey and shredded pieces of turkey. Neither of them looked all that appealing. There was certainly a skill to cutting a turkey that I hadn’t perfected yet.
As dinner got started, each of us sat on one side of the table. Cassidy was directly across from me, Katherine to my right, and Bob to my left. The night seemed to be shaping up to be really amazing. I felt like they actually liked me and couldn’t wait to learn more about them.
“So, young man, what are your intentions with my daughter?” Bob asked me before we had even said grace.
“Bob, give the man a break. He’s just a friend,” Katherine spoke up.
“Daddy, he’s really just a friend.”
“Okay, okay, but there will be no hanky-panky going on in my house. Are you two clear on that?”
Bob looked directly at me as he asked the question, but Cassidy was the one who actually ended up answering him. It was a good thing she was prepared to answer him because I could hardly move. I tried to think of something appropriate to respond with, and all that kept running through my head were sarcastic remarks.
“Dad, we aren’t friends in that way!” Cassidy said with enthusiasm.
“Bob, let’s just have a nice Christmas dinner, please,” Katherine added.
So far, I was pretty sure that Katherine liked me and Bob hated my guts. One of two didn’t seem like that bad of a job considering I was new at the whole meeting the parents thing.
We made it through grace and I took to eating and letting the family talk. I really enjoyed just sitting and listening to their conversation. It was like being a member of their family, without actually being a member.
I didn’t want to refuse the meal that had taken so much time and effort, so for that one night I gave up my vegan eating ways and just enjoyed dinner with Cassidy and her family. It wasn’t going to kill me to have a little meat.
Cassidy was respectful and funny with her parents. She was at ease around them, and that was weird for me to see. I couldn’t remember feeling at ease around my own father. Yet, I very clearly remembered how comfortable my mother had made me. Perhaps since Cassidy had both her mother and her father, things were just better between everyone.
The more I watched and listened, though, the more I started to feel like Bob was just a nicer version of my own father. He was still really cranky and wanted to do things his own way, but he listened to his wife and daughter, who always seemed to have something to tell him. He was a rough man, but gentle with the women in his life. I imagine my father would have been a lot like Bob if my mother had lived.