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“I don’t know what else to do,” I said honestly. “I’m making the turkey for my dad and brother today…and I don’t know what to do.”
Honestly and truly, I was lost. I had no earthly idea what it was that I was supposed to do at this point, and the only other option I had was calling Castiel.
I’d tried calling Jubilee, but I’d hung up about two seconds into the call knowing that she was likely still asleep and that she had done a lot for me over the last couple of days instead of being at her honeymoon.
“What do you mean you don’t know what to do?” he asked, sounding slightly more awake. “Do you not know how to cook it?”
“I have the gist of that, I think.” I paused as I looked at the turkey that was sitting in my kitchen sink. “I don’t know how to do…the first part. The getting it ready for the oven part. It says I’m supposed to stuff the turkey with oranges and apples, but I can’t get the legs apart.”
“Did you take the plastic thing off the legs?” he asked.
I poked the nasty looking bird with one finger.
“Ummm… I don’t see anything plastic,” I murmured, looking around really good. Then paused when I saw what looked like a zip tie at the end of the two thighs. “Does it look like a zip tie?”
“Yes,” he said. “You should be able to get it off without scissors.”
I paused in my reach for the scissors—he knew me well—and put the phone onto speaker and set it on the counter next to the turkey.
Then I started to get the stupid piece of plastic off.
Needless to say, I should’ve just used the damn scissors. By the time I’d gotten it off, I was sweating and cursing up a storm.
“I finally got it,” I breathed, wiping my brow with my sleeve. Why was it all of a sudden so damn hot in here? And why the hell had I thought it a good idea to leave my hair down? “What now?”
“Now you start pulling everything out of the inside of it,” he instructed, sounding like he was moving now. “Reach in there and get it all out.”
I reached in there, and I felt something slimy, long, and cylindrical.
I blinked and tugged it all the way out, instantly disgusted.
Swallowing hard, I said, “There’s something that came out of it that I don’t think should’ve come out of it.” I paused. “I think I need a new turkey. This one is defective.”
He sounded like he was wheezing.
“There’s a neck that looks like a long, crooked dick if that’s what you’re looking at.” He was laughing now. That’s why he was wheezing. “It’s not the dick. It’s the neck, I swear to God. You have to get that out. Plus the bag of giblets that are stuck in its ass.”
“That looks like a dick,” I said quietly, staring at the ‘neck’ in my sink. “Are you sure it’s a neck?”
There was uncontrollable laughter on the other end of the line.
“Swear to Christ,” he encouraged me, wind sounding in the background as he spoke. “It’s a neck.”
I wasn’t sure that made it much better.
“Now how do I get the giblets out?” I questioned.
I heard a door slam, and then quiet again.
I assumed he’d gone outside for something and was now back inside.
What was he doing going outside so early in the morning? When it was raining cats and dogs? When he didn’t have a front porch?
But before I could question him, he started explaining how to get the giblets bag out.
“And what are giblets?” I asked curiously, doing as I was told and flipping the bird over.
“They’re the organs,” he said. “Some people like to eat those.”
I gagged. “That sounds disgusting.”
“To each their own, I guess,” he said, sounding slightly distracted.
“Do you need to go?” I questioned.
“No,” he answered immediately. “I was just thinking about the rest that you needed to do to get that bird ready to go.”
It was once it was all the way done, neck fat trimmed, giblets and neck tossed, bird rinsed and all the extra juices dried off, that it finally hit me.
I still had to cook this stupid bird.
I had to make a tasty meal out of a turkey for my family, and I’d never, not once, cooked a turkey before.
My grandmother had offered to do it, and maybe I should’ve taken her up on that.
Maybe I should’ve allowed someone else to help.
But it’d been tradition for eighteen years that the eldest sibling brought the turkey, and all the other siblings brought the side dishes.
I didn’t want to ruin the tradition.
Then I started to cry.
“Castiel, I can’t do this,” I whimpered into the phone.
I wiped my eyes with my shoulder, one by one, and tried to tell myself to breathe.
