Talk Turkey (4 page)

“Maybe it’ll fall apart.” That had happened to most of the storms the news had tracked since he’d gotten to Chicago. It seemed like forecasts were just guesses out here. “It’s going to take a long time for me to get used to how unpredictable the weather is here. I may not be cut out to be a Midwestern boy.”

Tom snorted. “Wait until the first real summer thunderstorm, or even the first tornado watch of spring.”

Carson had taken Chicago’s long, cold winters into account when he’d been mulling over the job offer, but he hadn’t thought about the other types of weather the Midwest got. “You’re really selling it. Are you sure you’re going to leave Cali after Christmas?”

“Eh, you get used to it,” Tom said dismissively. “Good luck with your turkey. You have the hotline number and my e-mail if you get into trouble.”

Carson nodded, then realized Tom couldn’t see him. “I do. Thanks for all your help.”

“It’s my job.”

Right. This was Tom’s job, and Carson was holding him up. He probably had hourly call quotas or something and Carson was eating into that time. “Well, you’re good at it. Merry Christmas, Tom.”

Carson ended the call, his pulse hammering in his throat. He half hoped Tom would call him back, but the more rational part of him knew better than to expect that. Tom was friendly, and Carson had latched on to that and blurred the lines. Of course Tom hadn’t given him his e-mail address so they could stay in touch. Tom probably lived in Nebraska and had never even been to Chicago. Or maybe he was working in a call center in New Delhi and passed the time by playing around with callers by using his really good American accent.

And even if Tom was in Chicago, which was ridiculous, he wouldn’t want to start something up with someone who’d called the hotline because they were too pathetic to figure out how to cook their own turkey. Or make friends in a new city.

Carson sighed. He manfully resisted the urge to open the refrigerator and check on Terry, mindful of Tom’s scolding about raising the temperature and spoiling his food.

How sad was it that he actually hoped Terry
didn’t
thaw in time, just so he could keep it around and talk to it some more? God. He needed a pet or something.

Maybe that’s what he’d do tomorrow. He could find the nearest animal shelter and adopt a cat. Dogs were a lot of work, but a cat would hardly be more of a burden than Terry. He could see himself as a cat person. It would be like an aloof, independent roommate who was fuzzy and occasionally liked to cuddle.

Cleaning out a litter box wouldn’t be that bad, would it? Carson looked over at the overflowing trash can in the kitchen that he’d been meaning to empty for the last week. He’d given up at some point and just started stacking cereal boxes and take-out containers on the floor next to it.

A cat would require regular feeding, which would mean regular trips to the grocery store. He wrinkled his nose. No cat, then. Terry was enough for now. After Christmas, maybe he’d look into a pet rock.

“S
HOW
ME
again!”

Carson laughed and shook his head. “I’ve already shown you the snow four times, Lucas. It’s not any different now than it was ten minutes ago.”

Except it was. Carson looked past his laptop screen and out onto his balcony. There had to be a good six inches of fresh snow on top of the four that had fallen yesterday, and it didn’t look like the storm was done yet. The weatherman had been almost maniacally gleeful when he’d announced the system might dump more than a foot and a half of snow on Chicago by Christmas morning.

Practically everything was shut down. Both airports had grounded all flights for the night, and even the L was having trouble. He’d probably heard a grand total of three cars go by in the last hour—people were walking in the middle of the streets, pulling sleds. It was unreal.

His niece, Shanna, elbowed her cousin, Lucas, out of the frame. “It’s not fair that you get snow for Christmas, Uncle Carson! I wanna have snow. Mama, will Santa bring me snow?”

Carson heard his sister sigh off camera. “Sweetie, we’re going to see snow tomorrow, remember?”

Shanna pouted. “But that’s not the same as it being here.”

“If it snowed here, it would just melt,” Lucas said with all the world-weary aplomb a ten-year-old could muster.

“Nuh-uh, because it would be from
Santa
so it would be
magic
,” Shanna taunted. “Duh.”

Carson snickered at the way Lucas turned toward the camera and rolled his eyes. He loved his entire family, but Lucas was the one he really missed. They were like two peas in a pod.

“I’d send you some if I could, Shan. But your snow is going to be so much cooler. You can’t really ski on this snow. There aren’t any mountains here in Illinois,” Carson said with a wink. “Maybe you can get your Mom to bring you out here later this winter so you can compare my snow with the snow you’ll see in Tahoe tomorrow.”

Shanna’s eyes lit up. “Yes!” she hissed.

His sister’s face appeared in front of the camera. “You are evil,” she muttered.

“Aw, Kari, c’mon. Don’t you miss me? Don’t you want to come see how your little brother’s doing?”

She pursed her lips. “You know I do. We all do. Christmas isn’t the same without you here.”

Carson put on his best happy face. “I’ll be there next year, I promise. And I’m doing okay. Really. I have my turkey ready to go in the oven tomorrow, and all the fixings to go with it, and you already saw the tree and everything.”

He’d spent the last two days decorating the tree he’d bought on the corner, and having it there really did make it feel more like Christmas. His mom had shipped out a box of ornaments for him, and it hadn’t seemed right to just let them sit there.

“God, your apartment is tiny,” Kari groaned. “I don’t know how you aren’t going stir-crazy.”

“You know what they say about living in the city,” he said with a shrug. “Space is at a premium, but it hardly matters because there’s so much to do out there that no one is ever at home.”

He was careful to speak broadly and avoid any actual lies. He didn’t say
he
was never home. And it
was
something that most people said. It was probably even true for them. It just wasn’t for Carson.

It wasn’t his fault that he’d talked so much about Tom that his mom assumed he was a real friend. Carson had tried to correct her, but she’d been so damn happy that he wouldn’t be alone that he hadn’t had the heart to tell her the truth. It had spiraled from there, with him outright lying and saying Tom would be over on Christmas.

He wasn’t sure how he was going to get out of that one.

“We’re about ready to sit down to dinner. I’m going to pass you around to say good-bye to everyone,” Kari said. “I love you. Call us tomorrow, okay?”

“Give Shanna and Jeremy some kisses for me tonight,” he said. He blew one at her. “Love you.”

The video pixelated and shook as the laptop moved. His oldest brother, Adam, came into view. “Merry Christmas, baby bro,” he said. He held his fist up to the screen, and Carson snorted with laughter but followed suit, approximating a fist bump. “Love you, Car.”

Carson grinned. “Love you too.”

His other brother Neil’s face appeared, upside-down. “If you signed me up for another sock-of-the-month club this Christmas, I’m going to fly out to Chicago and make you eat them,” he said, his face stern up until the moment Adam tackled him. They collapsed to the floor in a blur, their laughter echoing through the microphone.

“I give, I give!” Neil gasped through his giggles. His forehead popped into view, followed by his eyes. “I love you even if you give me weird socks. Merry Christmas!”

“I didn’t sign you up for socks,” Carson promised. He hadn’t. He’d splurged and gone for a suspenders-of-the-month club this year.

He patiently said his good-byes as the rest of the family paraded in front of the camera. His mom was flushed from finishing dinner because the kitchen was always too hot, and his dad looked like he was about ready to banish all the grandkids to the basement because of the noise. Christmas as usual.

“You’re going to put some herbs under the turkey skin tonight, right? Then you’ll have a flavorful bird for your company tomorrow,” his mom said.

Ugh.
“Yeah, I will. It’ll be perfect. I’ll send you pictures, I promise.”

“I love you, bubbie,” she said, teary-eyed. She hadn’t called him that since sixth grade. Maybe they really did miss him as much as he missed them.

“I love you too, Mom. And Dad. Merry Christmas.”

C
ARSON
SLID
the laptop closed and turned out the living room light. It had been just getting dark when he’d started Skyping with his family, but it was full-on night now. It was surprisingly light outside, thanks to the snow. It reflected the moon and the streetlights, and the light reflecting off the still-falling snow turned the sky a gorgeous purple.

He’d turned his Christmas lights on when he’d given his family the tour, and he sat for a minute just enjoying the soft glow. His apartment looked more lived-in and settled in the flickering glow. He was hesitant to ruin it by turning on the harsh overhead lights and banishing all the shadows, exposing the hard edges and empty corners again.

But he had to get Terry ready, and then he was going to go to bed himself. He could hear his neighbors outside, hooting and hollering as they frolicked in the powdery snow, but it was too cold out there for him. Besides, playing in the snow wasn’t a solitary activity.

Carson sighed and stood, flicking on the lamp on the table as he went. The living room still looked pretty good like that. Maybe he’d get more lamps and stop using the fluorescents altogether.

There was no other choice but the overhead in the kitchen, and he squinted a bit when it hummed to life. Terry had been fully defrosted when he’d woken up this morning, so now he just had to figure out where to stuff the herb mix his mother had talked him through making earlier.

The pamphlets Tom had sent a few weeks ago were still scattered over the kitchen table, which was pretty damning—both in that it showed how little Carson used the table and how often he’d read the damn things. It was stupid, especially since it wasn’t like Tom had written them, but reading them made Carson think about Tom, and thinking about Tom made him smile, so the pamphlets had become something of a permanent fixture.

They were also how he knew he was going to have to take the wrapper off Terry and reach inside to grab the bag of God only knows what that was inside. Who in their right mind would want that bag of disgusting turkey parts? The pamphlet said they were good for making gravy, but Tom had told him to make gravy out of the drippings in the pan, and he hadn’t mentioned turkey necks or whatever else was in there.

Carson rolled up the sleeves of his sweater and hauled Terry out of the refrigerator and plopped it in his sink. Unwrapping a turkey that large was a bit unwieldy, but he made it work. How was he supposed to get that bag out, though? The hole was tiny.

He gritted his teeth and worked his fingers in, hoping the hole where Terry’s neck had been would open up a bit with some pressure. His hand slid in with a disgusting squelch.

Carson felt around tentatively, sighing in relief when his fingers closed over plastic. He’d been a little worried that the neck and other things were just going to be shoved up in there, even though everything he’d read said they’d be tied up neatly just like this.

He grabbed the bag and started to pull his hand out, wincing when the hole didn’t open up for him the way he’d expected it to. He tried again, his panic rising. He even let go of the bag and squeezed his fingers together to make his hand as small as possible, but there was no way it was coming out.

His hand was stuck inside Terry. Jesus Christ.

Carson braced his free hand against the turkey and kept pulling until he could feel the skin on his stuck hand start to chafe where it rubbed against the hard ridge of Terry’s neck opening. He bit his lip, holding in a laugh that was just this side of hysterical. How was this his life?

He scanned the kitchen, wondering what he could try next. Maybe he could lube his hand up with olive oil or butter or something? Though, it was wedged in tightly and he wasn’t sure how he’d get it down in there where it could actually help.

His knives were right there in the block, but Carson didn’t like his chances with that route. He was shaky at best with his left hand, and it would take a lot of force to cut through Terry’s bones.

What else could he do, though? Run next door to the neighbors he still hadn’t met, brandishing a turkey on his arm? They’d probably call the cops.

His gaze fell on his phone, which he’d left charging on the counter. Tom. He could call Tom. Tom would know what to do. Tom probably talked people through having turkeys on their hand every day.

Carson wiped his left hand on his pants and reached for his phone. Unsanitary, but he had bigger problems right now than turkey diseases. Scrolling was awkward, but luckily he hadn’t made too many calls since the last time he’d talked to Tom. He hit dial with his thumb and held the phone to his ear, praying Tom or someone else at the hotline was still there.

Shit. Tom had been planning to fly to the West Coast for Christmas, which meant he probably wasn’t there. Would Tom’s private number ring over into the general hotline if he wasn’t working? Hopefully. He’d rather talk to Tom, but at this point, Carson wasn’t really in the position to be turning down help, wherever he could get it.

Five rings in, Carson’s stomach dropped. The hotline probably wasn’t even open. It was after nine on Christmas Eve. The thing probably closed in the afternoon like everything else. Carson was going to have to call the fire department or something—

“Hello? Carson?” Tom sounded a bit hoarse, like he’d just woken up. “Carson?”

Carson slumped in relief, letting Terry—and his arm—
thunk
back into the sink. “Tom? God, I was worried you were closed for the day.”