The bell over the door at Kessler's Market had been ringing all day, and by a quarter to eight on the night before Thanksgiving it sounded tired, the way a church bell sounds after a long funeral. Nora Haverty pushed through it with her cheeks stinging from the cold and her list crushed in one gloved fist, and she knew before she had taken three steps onto the scuffed linoleum that she was too late for nearly everything.
The shelves looked as if a flood had gone through them and taken what it wanted. Where the canned pumpkin should have been there was only a strip of price tags and one dented can of beets lying on its side. The flour was gone. The cranberry sauce was gone, except for a single can that had rolled behind the pickled herring and been forgotten. Somebody had knocked over a display of paper napkins printed with cartoon pilgrims, and nobody had bothered to set it right. In the produce bins a few sweet potatoes lay like stones at the bottom of a creek, and a handwritten sign taped to the scale said SORRY FOLKS — CELERY SOLD OUT — ART.
It was 1974, and the whole country had spent the year learning to live with less. There had been gas lines in the spring that stretched around the block past the Methodist church, and the newspapers were full of words like inflation and recession, and at the register the cashier, a heavy, kind girl named Bonnie Szabo, wore a red button pinned to her smock that said WIN, which stood for Whip Inflation Now, which was what the new president had asked everybody to do. Nobody in Harlan Falls, Pennsylvania, was quite sure how to whip anything. They just bought what they could and went home.
Nora had not meant to come so late. She taught the second grade at Lincoln Elementary, and the last day before a holiday was always a kind of controlled riot, twenty-six children vibrating with sugar and the promise of four days off, and afterward there had been construction-paper turkeys to take down from the windows and a parent conference with a father who could not understand why his son would not stop biting people. Then her Volkswagen had refused to start in the school lot, and she had stood in the cold with the hood up — the engine in the back, the trunk in the front, a fact she still found personally insulting — until the janitor came out with jumper cables and a lecture. And the whole time she had been thinking about the turkey. She had ordered it from Kessler's two weeks ago, a twenty-pound bird, and Art Kessler had promised to hold it for her, but when she reached the meat counter the butcher was already hosing down the floor and the order book was closed and a boy with a mop looked at her with genuine pity.
"Mr. Kessler got called home," the boy said. "His wife's mother fell. I don't know nothing about any orders, ma'am. Anything that wasn't picked up by six went out into the case."
So she went to the case.
The frozen-food case at Kessler's ran along the back wall, a long low coffin of white enamel and fogged glass that hummed like a sleeping animal. She walked its whole length with her heart sinking a little more with every empty bay. Peas, gone. Lima beans, gone. Two boxes of fish sticks and something labeled TURKEY ROLL that looked like a gray loaf of bread wrapped in plastic. And then, at the very end, in the far corner where the frost had built up into a thick white crust, she saw it.
One turkey. One single, solitary, beautiful frozen turkey, nestled in its net bag like an egg in a nest, the yellow label crusted with ice. Twenty pounds if it was an ounce. The last turkey, she was quite certain, in all of Harlan Falls.