The Photographs That Came Home for Thanksgiving

The fire started on a Wednesday in March, in an outlet behind the toaster, while Marlene Dobbs was at choir practice singing alto on “It Is Well.”

By the time the trucks came up Sycamore Lane, the kitchen was gone and the hallway was black to the ceiling. Nobody was hurt. The cat had been under the porch. Curtis had been at the hardware store buying a furnace filter, and he stood in the gravel drive holding it for an hour afterward, as if it were the one thing he’d been told to keep safe.

The insurance man was kind. He walked through with a flashlight and said the roof could be saved, and the bedrooms, and most of the furniture with enough scrubbing. Then he opened the hall closet and went quiet.

Forty-six years of photo albums had lived on those shelves. Vinyl covers, the old sticky pages, the green one with gold corners that Marlene bought the week Denise was born. They had slumped into one another like candles left in a hot car.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We can replace a sofa.”

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All summer they lived in a rented duplex on Orchard Street in town, two small rooms that smelled like somebody else’s coffee.

Marlene was thankful. She said so in Sunday school at Little Elk Creek Church and meant every word. Curtis was fine. The house was coming along, one drywall sheet at a time.

But at night she lay awake and found she couldn’t remember the color of her mother’s Easter coat. She couldn’t remember whether Denise’s first-grade bangs had gone crooked on the left or the right. She had never needed to remember those things, because they had always been in the closet.

She’d ordered double prints for forty years, every roll, and Curtis used to tease her about it. “Paying good money to give pictures away,” he’d say. But the doubles were long gone, tucked into birthday cards and mailed to Paducah and Columbus and wherever else, probably sitting in drawers under rubber bands and expired coupons.

In October, Curtis set down his fork at supper and said, “We’re having Thanksgiving.”

“Here?” She looked at the kitchenette, at the stove with two working burners.

“Here. Everybody’s coming. I already called them.”

“Curtis, we don’t have a table that seats more than four.”

“Pastor Neely says the church has folding tables and the white cloths. I’ll borrow them.” He had the look he got when he’d made up his mind about a fence post. “We’ve had Thanksgiving every year since 1979. I’m not letting an outlet take that too.”

She didn’t argue. She didn’t have the strength. Instead she made her list the way she always had, on the back of an envelope, and discovered she had to buy every single thing on it. The roasting pan. The gravy boat. The baster. Even the little china pilgrims who had stood guard by the cranberry sauce since Denise was six were gone, and there wasn’t a pair like them in any store in the county.

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Thanksgiving came in gray and cold, with sleet ticking at the windows.

Curtis ran the two church tables end to end, straight through the doorway from the kitchenette into the living room, so that half the family would be eating beside the television. Every folding chair had a strip of masking tape underneath that said PROPERTY OF LITTLE ELK CREEK in Mrs. Gaither’s careful capitals.

They came stomping in out of the weather around noon. Denise and Rob up from Columbus with the twins. Curtis’s sister Bernadine all the way from Paducah, Kentucky. Cousin Phyllis with her famous corn pudding. Nephew Travis, whose mother had been Curtis’s other sister, gone eleven years now.

Marlene noticed that everybody was carrying something besides a covered dish. A cookie tin. A shoebox. A big brown envelope under an arm. She supposed they were bringing hand-me-downs, kitchen towels and spare spoons, the kind of thing people give when your house burns. She was too tired to wonder long.

When they were all squeezed in, elbow to elbow, Curtis stood up at the head of the table.

“I’ve been chewing on a verse all year,” he said. “‘In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.’ That’s First Thessalonians 5:18.” He cleared his throat. “I noticed it doesn’t say for every thing. It says in. I figure that’s the Lord being gentle with us.”

He prayed, short and plain the way he always did, and then he didn’t sit down.

“Bernadine,” he said. “Go ahead.”

His sister reached across the sweet potatoes and set a blue cookie tin beside Marlene’s plate. Marlene lifted the lid.

It was full of photographs.

The one on top showed Curtis at thirty, holding a carving knife over a golden turkey, grinning like a fool. Marlene turned it over and saw her own round handwriting: Thanksgiving 1983. Ten seconds later this bird hit the floor. We ate it anyway.

She couldn’t say anything at all.

Phyllis slid a fat envelope across the cloth. Denise set down her shoebox, the one she’d kept from college, full of every snapshot Marlene had ever slipped into a care package with a twenty-dollar bill and a note about eating vegetables. Travis came last. He put down a single picture in a dime-store frame: his mother, young and laughing, at this family’s table in a red sweater, the year she brought the green bean casserole with too many onions.

“You sent me that after the funeral,” he said quietly. “I figured you’d want it back for a while.”

Marlene looked down the long white table at her husband.

“You called them in October,” she said.

“I just asked them to look in their drawers.” He sat down at last. “You’ve been mailing this family to everybody for forty years, Marlene. I only asked for some of it back.”

The turkey got cold. Nobody minded.

They passed pictures hand to hand over the rolls and the corn pudding until the cloth was covered with them. The twins couldn’t believe Grandpa ever had that much hair. Rob found a photo of Denise on a pony and laughed until he had to wipe his glasses.

And there was Marlene’s mother, standing on the church steps with a white purse over her arm, wearing her Easter coat. It was blue. Robin’s egg blue, with three big buttons.

Denise’s bangs had gone crooked on the left.

Not everything came home. Most of the green album was simply gone, the baby pictures and the first apartment. But Marlene held what she had, and found that her hands had stopped trembling for the first time since March.

Before pie, Rob stood the twins on chairs and took a picture of everybody crowded around the borrowed tables, the sleet still falling outside the window.

“Send me that,” Marlene told him. “I want it printed.”

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The prints came in the mail two weeks later. She’d ordered doubles.

She sat at the little kitchen table on Orchard Street and wrote on the back of both in her round, careful hand. Thanksgiving. Orchard Street, the year of the fire. Everybody came.

Then she addressed an envelope to Paducah, licked the flap, and set the other copy aside for the new closet.