Most Thanksgivings, you’ll find my husband and one of my brothers at our dinner table gnawing on turkey legs like a couple of peasants at a renaissance festival. And he never said so, but I suspected my spouse considered it a silver lining of the pandemic that he’d have both drumsticks to himself on Thanksgiving 2020.

Even though we were going to be alone for the holiday he’d been adamant that we have the whole feast, so I’d selected the smallest turkey I could find. On Thanksgiving morning he began to prepare it as he does every year. I was pondering how quiet our holiday was compared to previous years, when I heard frantic hollering from the kitchen. “There’s no legs…no wings…no pop-up thing.” I rushed to the kitchen to discover that someone had indeed stolen our turkey’s appendages. It was barbaric.

Maybe not. A glance at the package revealed there’d been no “fowl” play after all. I hadn’t purchased a small turkey. I’d brought home a large turkey breast.

My husband looked downright betrayed. I was disappointed too. We both think turkeys would be better if they were made up entirely of dark meat. We had none of that and it was my fault. I’d have been sent to my room without dinner if it wasn’t my job to make everything else.

It’s hard to believe it’s possible, but things went downhill from there. My husband assumed that the small bag that came with our turkey contained giblets. It didn’t. It was a packet of gravy and it sprayed the kitchen when he tore it open.

And he’d been right about there being no pop-up temperature indicator in our turkey breast. Of course, those are pointless if the turkey doesn’t cook, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We had to eat something so my normally mild-mannered spouse jammed the turkey breast into the oven unceremoniously and left the kitchen to grieve. I set about making the potatoes, green beans and stuffing—the boxed kind that doesn’t require contact with a turkey. Good thing. We got so hungry we gobbled it up later as an appetizer.

I may have been a little preoccupied thinking about our paltry poultry because I didn’t notice that something was missing in my kitchen: the aroma of roasting turkey. When I checked the turkey it was as cold as my darling’s heart at the moment.

It’s possible that in the confusion, I’d bumped the switch and turned the oven off. That’s easy to do with our oven. But I prefer to think he forgot to turn it on in the first place because that makes us even.

Dorothy Rosby is a blogger and humor columnist whose work appears regularly in publications throughout the West and Midwest. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays all available locally at Mitzi’s Books and on Amazon.