Bourbon in the Pantry: A Thanksgiving Story

Let me tell you about the Thanksgiving that shattered like fine china and reassembled itself into something altogether stranger, because that's what families do - they break and mend and break again, like waves against a shore that's been there since before any of us thought to name it.

Sarah (my sister-in-law who spent three months at a French culinary institute and won't let any of us forget it) has been basting the turkey since dawn, each careful brush stroke a rebellion against our mother's decades of dry birds. The kitchen gleams with her intentions. Everything is mise en place, a term she drops like small arms fire across the gravy-scented battlefield of familial expectations.

And here comes Mom through the door clutching her own gravy boat like a shield, because she may have ceded the turkey but by God and all His angels she will not surrender the gravy. Her lips are pressed thin as paper, the kind of smile that's really a wound. Dad trails behind her carrying three kinds of pie none of us asked for, whistling through the minefield.

(I should mention I'm hiding in the pantry taking pulls from a flask of bourbon that belonged to my grandfather, the one who taught me how to tie fishing flies and curse in Lithuanian. The bourbon tastes like memory and regret, which is fitting for the occasion.)

Uncle Pete's already sprawled in the living room watching football with the volume too high, his hearing aid conspicuously absent, a convenient deafness that lets him ignore the rising tide of passive-aggressive commentary flowing from the kitchen like floodwater under a door. His new wife Cheryl (the fourth, or maybe fifth - we've stopped counting) keeps adjusting and readjusting the table settings Sarah spent forty-three minutes perfecting.

My brother Mike's kids are conducting what appears to be psychological warfare experiments on each other in the basement, their shrieks piercing through floorboards that have witnessed forty years of family gatherings. The youngest one - Trevor or Travis, I can never remember - has already broken something valuable, judging by the sudden silence followed by furious whispers.

And here we all are, orbiting around this bird that Sarah has transformed into some kind of glossy food magazine centerfold, each of us carrying our own unique burden of expectations like stones in our pockets. Mom remembers every Thanksgiving from 1973 forward and measures each one against some impossible standard of maternal perfection. Dad just wants everyone to get along and maybe watch the game. Sarah needs us to acknowledge her culinary superiority while simultaneously maintaining her role as the perpetually unappreciated artist.

The prayers, when we finally sit down, are a masterpiece of competing denominational interests - Catholic crossed with Baptist crossed with whatever crystal-based spirituality Cheryl's bringing to the table this year. We bow our heads and clutch hands and each silently bargain with our respective deities to just get us through this meal without anyone mentioning politics or that thing that happened at last year's Easter.

But then Sarah's turkey actually is perfect, damn her, and Mom's gravy performs its annual miracle, and Uncle Pete tells that story about the fish he caught in '82 that gets bigger every year, and somehow we're all laughing. And for a moment - brief as grace, fleeting as autumn - we're just a family, bound together by nothing more or less than blood and time and the peculiar alchemy of shared food.

The kids have escaped to their phones, and the adults are settling into their post-feast positions like birds coming home to roost, and I'm thinking about pouring another secret bourbon when Mom brings out the pies. And even though we're all stuffed fuller than that turkey was this morning, we each take a slice because that's what you do. That's what we've always done. That's what we'll keep doing until we can't anymore, and then we'll tell stories about the pies that were and the gravy that was, and the years will fold into each other like pastry layers, flaky and delicate and impossibly rich.