The Accidental Tourist

light above the stove. One hundred and forty degrees, the oven dial read. “Certain death,” he told Edward, who had tagged along behind him. Then Charles walked in, wearing large, floppy pajamas. He peered at the dial and sighed. “Not only that,” he said, “but this is a stuffed turkey.”

“Wonderful.”

“Two quarts of stuffing. I heard her say so.”

“Two quarts of teeming, swarming bacteria.”

“Unless there’s something to this method we don’t understand.”

“We’ll ask her in the morning,” Macon said, and they went back to bed.

In the morning, Macon came down to find Rose serving pancakes to the children. He said, “Rose, what exactly is it you’re doing to this turkey?”

“I told you: slow heat. Jam, Danny, or syrup?”

“Is that it?” Macon asked.

“You’re dripping,” Rose said to Liberty. “What, Macon? See, I read an article about slow-cooked beef and I thought, well, if it works with beef it must work with turkey too so I—”

“It might work with beef but it will murder us with turkey,” Macon told her.

“But at the end I’m going to raise the temperature!”

“You’d have to raise it mighty high. You’d have to autoclave the thing.”

“You’d have to expose it to a nuclear flash,” Danny said cheerfully.

Rose said, “Well, you’re both just plain wrong. Who’s the cook here, anyhow? I say it’s going to be delicious.”

Maybe it was, but it certainly didn’t look it. By dinnertime the breast had caved in and the skin was all dry and dull. Rose entered the dining room holding the turkey high as if in triumph, but the only people who looked impressed were those who didn’t know its history — Julian and Mrs. Barrett, one of Rose’s old people. Julian said, “Ah!” and Mrs. Barrett beamed. “I just wish my neighbors could see this,” Julian said. He wore a brass-buttoned navy blazer, and he seemed to have polished his face.

“Well, there may be a little problem here,” Macon said.

Rose set the turkey down and glared at him.

“Of course, the rest of the meal is excellent,” he said. “Why, we could fill up on the vegetables alone! In fact I think I’ll do that. But the turkey…”

“It’s pure poison,” Danny finished for him.

Julian said, “Come again?” but Mrs. Barrett just smiled harder.

“We think it may have been cooked at a slightly inadequate temperature,” Macon explained.

“It was not!” Rose said. “It’s perfectly good.”

“Maybe you’d rather just stick to the side dishes,” Macon told Mrs. Barrett. He was worried she might be deaf.

But she must have heard, for she said, “Why, perhaps I will,” never losing her smile. “I don’t have much of an appetite anyhow,” she said.

“And I’m a vegetarian,” Susan said.

“So am I,” Danny said suddenly.

“Oh, Macon, how could you do this?” Rose asked. “My lovely turkey! All that work!”

“I think it looks delicious,” Julian said.

“Yes,” Porter told him, “but you don’t know about the other times.”

“Other times?”

“Those were just bad luck,” Rose said.

“Why, of course!” Porter said. “Or economy. You don’t like to throw things away; I can understand that! Pork that’s been sitting too long or chicken salad left out all night…”

Rose sat down. Tears were glazing her eyes. “Oh,” she said, “you’re all so mean! You don’t fool me for an instant; I know why you’re doing this. You want to make me look bad in front of Julian.”

“Julian?”

Julian seemed distressed. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket but then went on holding it.

“You want to drive him off! You three wasted your chances and now you want me to waste mine, but I won’t do it. I can see what’s what. Just listen to any song on the radio; look at any soap opera. Love is what it’s all about. On soap operas everything revolves around love. A new person comes to town and right away the question is, who’s he going to love? Who’s going to love him back? Who’ll lose her mind with jealousy? Who’s going to ruin her life? And you want to make me miss it!”

“Well, goodness,” Macon said, trying to sort this out.

“You know perfectly well there’s nothing wrong with that turkey. You just don’t want me to stop cooking for you and taking care of this house, you don’t want Julian to fall in love with me.”

“Do what?”

But she scraped her chair back and ran from the room. Julian sat there with his mouth open.

“Don’t you dare laugh,” Macon told him.

Julian just went on gaping.

“Don’t even consider it.”

Julian swallowed. He said, “Do you think I ought to go after her?”

“No,” Macon said.

“But she seems so—”

“She’s fine! She’s perfectly fine.”

“Oh.”

“Now, who wants a baked potato?”

There was a kind of murmur around the table; everyone looked unhappy. “That poor, dear girl,” Mrs. Barrett said. “I feel just awful.”

“Me too,” Susan said.

“Julian?” Macon asked, clanging a spoon. “Potato?”

“I’ll take the turkey,” Julian said firmly.

At that moment, Macon almost liked the man.

“It was having the baby that broke our marriage up,” Muriel said. “When you think about it, that’s funny. First we got married on account of the baby and then we got divorced on account of the baby, and in between, the baby was what we argued about. Norman couldn’t understand why I was all the time at the hospital visiting Alexander. ‘It doesn’t know you’re there, so why go?’ he said. I’d go early in the morning and just hang around, the nurses were as nice as could be about it, and I’d stay till night. Norman said, ‘Muriel, won’t we ever get our ordinary life back?’ Well, you can see his point, I guess. It’s like I only had room in my mind for Alexander. And he was in the hospital for months, for really months; there was everything in this world wrong with him. You should have seen our medical bills. We only had partial insurance and there were these bills running up, thousands and thousands of dollars. Finally I took a job at the hospital. I asked if I could work in the nursery but they said no, so I got a kind of, more like a maid’s job, cleaning patients’ rooms and so forth. Emptying trash cans, wet-mopping floors…”

She and Macon were walking along Dempsey Road with Edward, hoping to run into a biker. Muriel held the leash. If a biker came, she said, and Edward lunged or gave so much as the smallest yip, she was going to yank him so hard he wouldn’t know what hit him. She warned Macon of that before they started out. She said he’d better not object because this was for Edward’s own good. Macon hoped he’d be able to remember that when the time came.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and there’d been a light snow earlier, but the air didn’t have a real bite to it yet and the sidewalks were merely damp. The sky seemed to begin about two feet above their heads.

“This one patient, Mrs. Brimm, she took a liking to me,” Muriel said. “She said I was the only person who ever bothered talking to her. I’d come in and tell her about Alexander. I’d tell her what the doctors said, how they didn’t give him much of a chance and some had even wondered if we wanted a chance, what with all that might be wrong with him. I’d tell her about me and Norman and the way he was acting, and she said it sounded exactly like a story in a magazine. When they let her go home she wanted me to come with her, take a job looking out for her, but I couldn’t on account of Alexander.”