An Orphan Thanksgiving

AlamyNeal picked me up at Seatac airport the morning of Thanksgiving.

"Who's coming for dinner?" I asked after we embraced. He was the new boyfriend and I was newly smitten each time I saw him.

"I always do an orphans' dinner," he said. "There's a crowd. A good crowd."

I always did a family dinner. But earlier that summer my family had come undone. Now my kids were spending their first divorce Thanksgiving with their dad and I couldn't figure out how to do a holiday without them.

"I'll get to meet your friends," I said. I didn't say: Friends? I thought you were a loner, a cowboy, maybe even a hermit.

Neal lived on a ranch about 45 minutes from Tacoma. He had horses and dogs and an upstairs porch where we slept on a bed under mosquito netting. He was handsome and smart and even this far from civilization, a paperboy delivered the New York Times to his mile long driveway. Our courtship so far had been speedy (from what's-your-name to let's-spend-our-life-together in a matter of weeks), intense (when we weren't in Palo Alto or Washington we spent hours on the phone every day) and sometimes a little baffling – who is this guy? I couldn't fit Neal into the world I knew – Silicon Valley workaholics, big showy personalities. He had quit practicing tax law and started a business with a buddy renovating Victorian homes. He was quiet and modest and the only thing driving him was a need to be with me.

And then came the orphan's Thanksgiving. By the time we drove to the ranch, ten people had gathered in the kitchen and around the fire in the living room. Ten more showed up in the next hour. Neal prepared a twenty-seven pound turkey -- he's been a vegetarian since he was 11 years old, but somehow, at 40, he had perfected the turkey he never tasted. Everyone raved about it. His secret: he created a baster out of a horse syringe with a two-inch needle. Every hour he would slip the needle under the turkey's skin and inject it with a mixture of butter and sherry. I don't eat meat either, but if I did, Neal's turkey would be the first thing I'd taste.

But the real surprise of the evening was the friends. We sat around a long wooden table and talked about politics and literature and children and theater and music. Many of the friends were artists; all of them were fascinating. At one point in the evening, I was struck by a wild idea. I shared my idea out loud: "I know what this is. You're all actors. Neal hired you to convince me that he wasn't a loner. You're all the perfect friends. But none of you have ever met him before."

As a group, the dinner guests all rose and started clamoring for their payment. My mouth dropped open. Really? He created a fictional Thanksgiving?

But someone laughed and they all sat down and asked for more of that delicious turkey. They were for real. Neal was for real.

A year later, Neal cooked the turkey for my kids up at the ranch in Washington. The friends showed up again. I started to believe in my good life.

Ellen Sussman's new novel, French Lessons, will be published by Ballantine in May, 2011. She is the author of a novel, On a Night Like This, and editor of two anthologies, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave. Read her blog on Red Room.