“Then I’ll see you in May,” Jimmy said. Everyone heard it, and in the bare silence Kathleen poured herself some wine and said to Frank, “We’re fine at the clinic. Summer is injuries at home and work and up at the lake—this frost is as good as a vaccine.” Mason could tell she’d gone into some kind of mode, because she could not look at Sonny, and she felt mechanical, forced. “We’re still losing nurses,” she went on. There was a steady turnover at the medical center because the women’s husbands’ jobs kept disappearing. “We’re going to end up with a bumper crop of trainees and assistants.”
“How’s Mr. Brand here doing?” Frank asked her.
“He’s been worse,” Jimmy said. “This woman’s an angel.” He had spoken quietly, and the quiet now grew again.
“I’ve made an executive decision.” Marci came in from the kitchen and leaned on the doorjamb “We are not going to sit in the dining room. We are going to eat right here. We’ll make a little buffet table and be ready in a minute.” Kathleen stood and sidestepped into the kitchen, and Sonny asked Marci if she could help with anything. Craig asked who needed any wine, and he put two more logs on the fire. Frank asked Larry if he’d tried the antelope. Mason looked across at Jimmy and said, “You here, or are you dreaming already?”
Jimmy’s face broke, and he smiled. He was nodding faintly along with the song “In My Room.” “This is too slow, what a gambit, and it requires a great vocal,” he said.
“And a touch depressing,” Frank said.
“Brian Wilson,” Jimmy said. “He is a giant—the sad giant.” Suddenly the room filled with the smell of steaming turkey, and the business of the dinner began. A hundred dishes from the depot desk were shipped into the kitchen, and forty others came the other way. Marci brought Jimmy his plate of turkey and mushroom dressing and five tender spears of asparagus under melting butter and flecked with pepper. As platters rattled and knives were dropped and wine poured, one by one the diners crept back into the den settling onto the corners of things. Larry came last with a drumstick as big as his fist, and when he sat on the floor, Jimmy tapped his glass and held it out to the room. “Friends,” he said, “Thank you for moving this holiday up for me. Happy Thanksgiving. It is sweet for me to be here. Thank you, Marci.” In the silence as the CDs changed, each person in the room leaned forward and touched his glass with theirs.
“Please eat,” Marci said. “You’ll be up here for real Thanksgiving too, big boy,” she said to Jimmy, “unless you spill on the couch.”
“This is so good, Mrs. Ralston,” Sonny said. She sat beside Frank on the ottoman, her plate on her knees.
“It’s Marci, please.” Marci told her.
“I better make my announcement right now,” Frank said, stabbing the air with his fork. Faces lifted in alarm, and the quiet was so strange that Frank said, “Hey. It’s just this. Gentlemen, I am a liberty taker, and I have taken the liberty of entering us into the battle of the bands up at the world-famous Pronghorn Bar and Grill outside Gillette. I applied using twenty-five dollars of my own money, because the deadline was yesterday. I’m hoping you will all join me in thinking this a worthy, kick-ass venture that would be more than any of us has had lately, meaning the last thirty years, more or less.”
“The what?” Craig said. His mouth was full of turkey. “What?”
“Let’s just do it. Who’s driving?” Jimmy said. “I’m in. Not that there’s much of me.”
“A battle of what bands?” Craig said.
“You play two songs.” Frank said. “There’s prizes.”
“When is it?” Mason asked.