Gratitude Page 4

  “Tony?” Her voice was quiet, and she didn’t know what else to say at all. The man made himself smile and tensed, then pushed his tray under the glass, like everyone else did.

  “Mackenzie. I didn’t think to see you in a place like this.” It was simple enough statement, and he didn’t seem to want an answer, which was good, since the line moved on and Tony’s wife and kids didn’t respond to seeing her at all.

  They wouldn’t.

  There was no reason at all for them to know who she was.

  “Who’s that?” Blake nudged her shoulder with his own gently. There was a bit of seriousness to it, because her face had fallen. How could it not?

  “Oh, an old friend. I haven’t thought about him in years.” That part was true. She really hadn’t. He was just a face and a name to her now.

  Once upon a time that hadn’t been the case. Twenty years before they had very nearly gotten married. It was only that she’d gotten a very good job offer in another town, and that Tony didn’t want to move, that had broken them up. He was a nice guy, and seeing him here was hard for her. Some people didn’t belong in places like soup kitchens. Not on that side of the counter.

  It made her feel sad for a bit, even as she kept working. People were there to enjoy a rare hot meal, or that was the normal line. It was supposed to be a treat for them. A lot of these people just seemed normal though. Not homeless, not dirty or like they’d wasted their life on drugs. Not even lazy.

  Just people that had been hit hard by the downturn. It had been years since it started, but now it was branching out and things were getting a lot harder for more people, it looked like. It was hard to notice when you had a two income family and each of you turned nearly a quarter million a year. It masked things, since they weren’t that hard for her.

  Tony wasn’t a lazy person, or at least he hadn’t been when they’d dated. What had happened in his life to bring him to a place like this with his family?

  At least on that side of the counter. She made herself think that again. Like a talisman against bad luck. It mattered which side you were on.

  The kids were mainly hanging back, the ones coming for the free meal. Near the door. It was almost as if they realized that there were too many people, and that the families needed the food worse than college kids and twenty-somethings that were just trying to save a little by getting some free food.

  As the families moved in, right next to the obviously homeless, it painted a picture in her mind. It wasn’t something she liked to think about, but she saw it anyway. Her standing on the other side of that silver steam table, looking through the glass and feeling the shame and horror of Tony being there, dishing out food to the poor. To her. Thinking that he would probably look down on her then, and be glad that he’d broken up with her.

  Even though it had totally been a mutual decision. No one ever remembered that part, did they? No, it was always them leaving the evil, or in this case, less than perfect, ex.

  Except she didn’t think less of him. She thought less of herself for being… her.

  These people weren’t an object lesson for her kids. Using them like that was nearly evil. It was low and made her feel small. Like a child that had gotten caught stealing all the cookies. Worse, she’d actually been guilty of it for years. Blake had been part of it too, but sharing the blame didn’t make it any better, she found.

  That was clearly an error though, since there should have been only so much blame to go around, and if it was split, it should be halved. It didn’t work like that though, unfortunately.

  Somewhere along the way, she’d lost track of what it meant to be a person, and started to feel superior to others. As if she wasn’t the same girl that had worn hand-me-down dresses to school, including her graduation robe. Even her glasses had been old, and the frames gotten second hand. They’d most often been huge thick black things too, not anything that helped her self-esteem at all. More than anyone in her family, she should have remembered what it was like to be the one that needed some help. How hard it was to take, and how often no one really wanted to give it.

  She glanced at her children, who were smiling and handing out food with a will. Allison turned and called out, her voice chipper, which was hard to believe. She normally spent the whole day glum and pouty, not wanting to see the poor. This year, something was different.

  Mackenzie didn’t know what it was at first, but finally thought she figured it out when she heard what her daughter said. Even more impressive was the way she said it.

  “Benny, we need back-up on butter and… Cranberries. Turkey is at about half, and more rolls will be needed after that.” She managed to sound like she knew what she was talking about even. It sounded like an adult speaking to another grown up, not some pouting brat barely trying.

  Somewhere along the way her little girl had started to grow up.

  “Coming!” The male voice from the back was muffled, as people talked out in the dining area. There weren’t enough tables for everyone to have their own, so people shared. It was… Nice wasn’t the right word.

  Good.

  It was a good thing, but not a nice one. It was a kind thing that people had put this together, but not enough. Still, taking off her blinders, she looked out and realized that the people out there were all real. She’d said the words before, but they sank in suddenly. They had lives, and loves, and wives and husbands, and children. The only thing different between them, herself and say, Tony’s wife, was a bit of good fortune and picking the right career path.

  That thought hit her right between the eyes, like a ton of bricks.

  For years, she’d been trying to covertly tell her kids that if they just worked hard enough, applied themselves well and did what they were supposed to, then everything would turn out all right. They’d be wealthy and have everything they wanted. Nothing could ever go wrong, not if they did what she said.

  But it wasn’t true. She understood that now. All this time she’d believed in a lie. You could influence your fate, but you didn’t control it. Not really. A business could shut down, people could stop buying what you sold, or who knows what? When that happened, you had to scramble and keep trying, but what if there were just no jobs out there? What if no one had money to pay for anything?

  Worse, what if you ended up, through no fault of your own, in a food line on Thanksgiving Day, with some rich witch offering you cranberry sauce that had come from a can? By rote she filled the trays that came and smiled. It was a bit hard to manage, but she’d be damned if her mood was going to help ruin things for these people. Not today. Not any day, if she could help it.

  It made her think about what had happened earlier, in the car ride over. Allison had been trying to get out of coming again, and being the mom, Mackenzie had tossed off a stupid line about the “spirit of the holiday”.

  It hit her then that she wasn’t very thankful at all. Not really. She had a good life, but she always wanted more and never felt like it was enough. That was fear, a desire for security, and she didn’t think it would just go away. Growing up without much had set that deep into her soul, but…

  She had her kids, didn’t she?

  They were something to be thankful for. And Blake. He was a wonderful person. They were the thing that she loved most, and what she was proudest of.

  That was the same thing as being grateful, wasn’t it?

  She didn’t know, but her heart felt a tiny bit lighter after thinking about it, so maybe it was a real thing? Smiling she got the next tray loaded with cranberries, barely hearing the man tell her that he didn’t want any.

  Chapter four

  Daniel

  The room had an odd feeling to it. It was the kind of thing his grandfather would have attributed to the spirits. Real ones, at least in the mind of the old man, who never let anyone forget that they were part of the world around them. It was an edgy feeling. The kind of tension the air held before a storm. The kind of thing that, in his experience, never ended well. Not if a
crowd of people were involved.

  When Daniel had gone to Kenya, as part of a Doctors Without Borders outreach program, he’d noticed things like this several times. Almost always right before someone killed, or at least attacked, someone else. It seemed to him that there was something like that about to happen here. That it shouldn’t be happening at all didn’t matter. The room was telling him a story, and if he didn’t listen to it, he was a fool that deserved what he was going to get.

  Listening wasn’t the same as hearing. You could hear the sounds of the wilderness and not know what they meant, for instance. That had been what he’d normally experienced there, during the few summers he’d spent with his grandfather, on the reservation, away from the city. It wasn’t his fault that he’d been born in Seattle, or that his parents had wanted something more than life on the Res for all of them. Being a city boy had been a handicap that had lasted for years, when he went to see the old man in his run down little trailer.

  It had been a real lesson to him, when he was young, regardless. You could hear the birds, the crickets and the rustling, and notice that they’d all stopped, and not be clued in enough to know that a bear was approaching. That was what he was feeling at the moment. Like a large predator was coming and he just didn’t see it yet.

  Personally, he blamed the white man for it.

  That thought nearly got him to crack a smile, but there was too much tension for that, ever since Captain Red-Face and his Pilgrim forefather walked in. It was the boy that was wrong. He was nervous seeming and acting a bit too… It was hard to place. It was a kind of activism people normally reserved for college, when they held big dreams of changing the world, before they realized that the society they lived in didn’t really want to change. Most people were comfortable where they were and worried about losing their place. That meant they didn’t try to change at all.

  Jen waved to him from the door that led back into the kitchen. He’d migrated toward the front, in case he needed to head anything off, but the tension was both growing and spread out too much for him to locate where the danger was. That being the case, he could go and talk to his wife, if nothing else.

  “Hey.” He was too worried to use their normal term of endearment, which was Honey, meaning Jen picked up that something was off. She didn’t ask about it, and just pointed to the table that held the napkins and silverware.

  “We need to top off the napkins and check to make sure there are enough utensils. I wasn’t thinking that we’d be serving this many when I put them out. It’s nice of those kids by the door to hang back like that, and let the families go first, isn’t it?” She smiled and gestured, then turned to get something out of the oven, vanishing from the door without a word. That was the way of a busy event, so he didn’t take it personally.

  He did do a once over of the set up on the table and casually refilled the needed things. That was basically the napkins which were nearly gone, and the plastic forks. The little butter knives too. For some reason they had lots of spoons left. They were all white, and represented the destruction of the world, but it was what Jen had suggested and he didn’t want to tell her no about things that weren’t a big deal. That just led to fighting, and he tried to avoid that. She always won anyway, being so cute.

  The table was just an old thing he’d picked up at a rummage sale a few months back, and while covered with a festive vinyl covering that had a pilgrim turkey on it, the thing itself had seen better days. It was sturdy and the cracks were hidden, so it would do. Their budget for this had been… Small. Really, if it hadn’t been for his pal Shel Neumann coming up with about half of the money out of his own pocket, they wouldn’t have been able to do it at all.

  Now there was a man to look up to. He regularly spent over half of what he made, just helping other people. No one really knew about it, because the man never mentioned it at all. He was humble and generous on a level that left Daniel feeling a tiny bit like nothing he did would ever be enough.

  Sheldon had even come up with a few volunteers. Four of whom had actually showed up. That was impressive, even if the insulting costumes were a thing he could have done without. On the Reservation they always joked about the day, calling it “Thankstaking” because of that part of things. The damned pilgrim outfits. The idea that the day should be about their corpse eating and grave robbing ancestors, instead of appreciating what they had.

  Then, most of them didn’t know their own history, did they? How the pilgrims hadn’t so much been given help from the local natives as plundered food stores, robbed graves for goods and supplies, and then in the depth of winter, ate the dead they’d found there. Not all of them, but some of them had. If it were his predecessors that had done that he would have hidden the fact too.

  Without trying to celebrate the events annually. The basic idea behind it all was good. Take time to give thanks. Nothing wrong with that. As long as you weren’t rubbing in the fact that what you had was taken from someone else by force. Then it got a little creepy.

  That wasn’t the problem at the moment. Right now, as Jen had pointed out to him, it was that a group of nearly fifty young people were standing over by the door, acting as if they were trying to be casual about everything. He didn’t trust that. Not now that he noticed it. The kids here were being polite and letting everyone else go first? Smiling and saying hello in a friendly manner to the people that were going ahead of them?

  Like that made sense? Today’s young were too self-centered for that, weren’t they? Not that he was ancient or anything. It seemed strange anyway. These people would have pushed into line first, to get the best food, or avoid homeless germs, they wouldn’t have stood and let others go ahead of them. On top of that, they seemed to be a bit edgy, and seemed like they knew it, looking at the others around them closely. Something then, was up.

  Lucas, the one that he’d decided could keep the name Captain Red-Face until he got out of his culturally insensitive get up, was looking at the clock too often, as well as the people by the door. It was Four-twenty-five, and while the boy might have just been bored already, that didn’t seem to be the case. In contrast his sister, mother and father were all just working away, smiling and trying to do a good job.

  The catch on the paper napkin dispenser stuck, and took a few minutes for him to clear. He was a GP, not an Engineer, so it was forgivable, he thought. It meant he was out in the room when it happened. When the storm broke and the rain came pouring down on them all.

  At first he thought that the young people were going for weapons, and he froze. There were at least fifty of them and even though half were women and many were a bit chunky, he couldn’t stop an attack by that many people alone. Especially if they had guns. It took a moment for his mind to adjust to what was really happening, as people pulled off shirts and jackets, and slipped insulting Faux Native style headbands on. Or, not so much insulting, he realized as he watched young Lucas come around the counter, but things that showed good intent, with just a bit of heavy handedness, and youthful exuberance.

  “This land was stolen from the Native! Remember that as you eat your sacrificed birds and pies of pumpkin!” This came from Lucas, who’d picked up a fake tomahawk and started to chant, making a “wah-wah” sound by lightly slapping his left hand over his mouth. Then, awkwardly, his glasses slipping a bit, the boy started to dance out into the room.

  Which got two responses. The first was from the group of now poorly dressed fake Indians, who followed him, making quite a racket. Then they started doing their version of a sacred Native American traditional dance.

  The Conga, if he had that right. It didn’t look much like the ones his tribe used at least.

  The second set of things to happen came from the people eating. They looked at the others, and started to clap. In unison for some unknown reason. It was strange enough that the people dancing started to grin and look embarrassed. Then, one full minute after they started, they kept going, right out the door.

  Daniel blinked and no
ticed that there were a half dozen people that had cell phone cameras out, and one with a real video recorder. That one was pointed at him, and he nearly made a quip about his soul being stolen, but instead managed a smile.

  “Dinner and a floor show. That’s going to be hard to beat, next year. We should talk the city into having a little parade.” He didn’t know what he was saying, since it had taken him so off guard.

  The young woman with the video camera walked up to him, holding it in front of her with both hands, looking serious.

  “This was a flash protest. Does it change your mind about the plight of Native Americans in this country? Or raise your awareness of the situation?”

  From the side a man he didn’t know, one of the homeless that had come in, called out loudly, his voice rough from years of hard living.

  “Bring back the dancing girls!”

  That got a laugh, and Daniel spread his hands in front of himself, trying not to mock the effort of the people that had come to get their message across. He could have told them it wouldn’t help anything, since, shocker, the white people weren’t going to just give it all back. No one from his family had ever even suggested they should. The kids meant well, and that was enough.

  “History is a rich and varied thing, and it would be good to remember that there is often more than one side to all tales. This is supposed to be a day of thanks, not one of judgment or condemnation. It’s a good time to realize that we all have enough to share with others, and to do so.” Hopefully the girl reporter would be done soon. Since he had to get back to the kitchen and… Not be there, with her. That was the real point, and what needed to happen. He waved once and walked away, making sure to check the line, which had stopped dead. They were missing Captain Red-Face. It wasn’t too bad yet, but people wanted their mashed potatoes and stuffing. It was tempting to just take his place, but Daniel knew that doing that might make the boy feel like he was in trouble.