Thanksgiving Apt. Adventure

Walt and Marlene went up to Capitol City for Thanksgiving with their daughter, Maria Betina. It was a different experience. Always before, Maria Betina and her friends would come down to the farm house on Wayout Road, in the Whazup River bottoms, and their son, Homer Walter, would bring his family and come, too, as would several aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and stray neighbors. But this year Homer Walter and Heloise and their children went for Thanksgiving in Omaha at her mother’s so they could meet her new husband, who is a slogan writer for The Tea Party, and Maria Betina’s friends were on Habitat-building trips to Mississippi, or to Las Vegas on habitat-losing trips, and the other relatives and neighbors had what they thought were better offers. It was a first for Marlene, not cooking the Thanksgiving dinner herself, and it was a first for both Marlene and Walter, because they had never been in an apartment building in a city before, especially not a fourth-floor walkup.

Several years ago, anticipating their “one-story only” age, they built a new ranch with a metal pole building out back, what Walt calls “an upstairs basement,” for all the stuff they would normally keep in a basement. They are not used to stairs, especially narrow enclosed stairwells where the apartment dwellers see if they can outwait the landlord when one of the weak stairwell bulbs burns out.

After they had climbed the four flights of stairs, carrying pumpkin pies, a cranberry salad, a green-bean casserole, and 8 settings of Grandma Gert’s dishes, which are required use at holiday meals, Walt propped the door to Apt. 4-A open while transferring all the food and dishes from the landing to the apartment, and Maria Betina’s three cats—Wilberforce, Disraeli, and Eleanor of Castile—escaped into the stairwell.

While Walt and Maria Betina chased the cats down the stairs, Marlene carried the food into the kitchen. At least she intended to, but she couldn’t, because, as quite a surprise to Marlene, the kitchens in city apartments are approximately one-tenth the size of a farm house kitchen, and this apartment kitchen was filled up with a burly man in a wife-beater undershirt and black jeans, with a tattoo on one bicep that read “Mother” and one on the other that read “Barbra.”

“Oh, my, who are you?” gasped Marlene.

“I’m Rudolpho, Maria Betina’s gay friend. You didn’t think she’d actually cook the meal herself, did you?”

“Oh, my, I guess I hadn’t thought about that. But I have been watching the word count go up, and I know no one reads past 450 words in a blog post, so we’d better continue this conversation tomorrow.”