It was a sad realization that all of my friends and acquaintances were drinkers and drug takers. Even my friend Spencer enjoyed a few too many drinks sometimes. But the difference between Spencer and I was that he had never almost killed himself because of his alcohol use. I had rationalized that all my friends drank alcohol so it was okay if I did, but it had taken me this long at treatment to realize they weren’t me. My friends might all drink, but none of them had consequences like I had.
Jarrod had helped me also realize that I couldn’t control other people in my life. I couldn’t control how Cassidy viewed me. I couldn’t control how my family wanted to treat me. The only thing in life I could control was myself, and even that was going to take a lot of work to get it right.
“Thank you for inviting me. I really hope you won’t get in trouble for this.”
“I don’t think I will. Mr. March loves me. The worst that will happen will be that he tells me not to do it again. Anyways, I’m not planning on working there much longer. I applied to nursing schools.”
“Oh, God. You’re going to be a nurse?” I said as I tried to hide the wide grin that made its way across my face.
“Why does it sound like you’re already thinking of something dirty?”
“Because you in a tight, little white nurse’s dress sounds amazing.”
“Since when have you ever seen a real nurse in a tight, white dress?” She laughed at me. “The nurses at Paradise Peak wear baggy and comfortable scrubs.”
“Cassidy, just give a guy his fantasies, please,” I said.
“I’m sure you have plenty of fantasies already and don’t really need me to add to them.”
It was probably time that we changed the subject, since I felt my body as it started to get hard thinking about Cassidy in a nurse’s uniform. I didn’t care if the nurses now didn’t wear those outfits anymore; I was going to keep the fantasy in my head and come back to it later that evening when I was alone in my bed.
“Dinner time, kids,” Cassidy’s mother said as she opened the sliding door.
“What was your mom’s name again?” I asked.
“Katherine, and my dad goes by Bob, but it’s really Robert.”
“Okay, I’ll try to remember,” I murmured as we walked into the house.
It smelled delicious, and I was hungrier than I could remember being in a long time. I had always eaten well in my life, but there wasn’t anything greater than a home-cooked meal. Especially a mother’s home-cooked meal.
Katherine at pulled a beautiful turkey out of the oven, and she already had about six side dishes on the table. There was no way the four of us would come close to eating all the food that she had prepared, but I sure as hell was going to give it a try.
“Katherine, this dinner smells amazing. Is there anything I can help with?”
“You can cut the turkey if you’d like. Bob hates doing it, but I make him do it every year.”
I didn’t know how to cut a turkey, but I certainly didn’t want to look like a rich, spoiled kid in front of Cassidy. Every grown man should at least know how to cut a turkey, or so I thought to myself as I grabbed the giant knife that Katherine handed me.
Cassidy stayed with me in the kitchen while her mother made her way to the other room to wait for us to serve the cut up turkey. Slowly, I let the knife saw into the side of the turkey and it returned me a large chunk of white meat. This didn’t seem all that hard after all. I just needed to saw down each side of the cooked bird and put the pieces of turkey onto the platter that was set out.
Cassidy seemed amused as she watched me cut through the first few pieces of meat. Her smile was brilliantly white and her giggles just as distracting to me as I tried to look professional in my turkey-cutting skills.
Even though I was technically a vegan, I didn’t have moral obligations that kept me from eating meat, or cutting it up for that matter. I really just couldn’t do it because I hadn’t ever seen someone cut a turkey before, and I had no frame of reference for where to start with the process.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” she finally asked me.
“I know what I’m doing. Just slice the meat off of the bone.”
“There’s a little more to it than that. You’ve got to make the pieces small enough that people can actually eat them. If you leave just large pieces, we will likely need to turn into barbarians and eat that meat with our hands.”
“I’m good with my hands.” I laughed as I held up a disproportionally sized slice of turkey.
“You can show me sometime,” she teased me.
I really couldn’t tell if she was serious or totally joking, but I was hard at just the possibility. Somewhere down the road could be after I got out of treatment. That would work great and made the most sense. But I suspected after treatment, Cassidy wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. She probably had guys hitting on her every round of patients that came through the doors.
By the time I reached the middle of the bird, I was basically just pulling off pieces of the meat and putting it on the place. So, basically there were giant, thick slices of turkey and shredded pieces of turkey. Neither of them looked all that appealing. There was certainly a skill to cutting a turkey that I hadn’t perfected yet.