A Mouthful of Thanksgiving

Crinkle, crinkle, skritch. A dry oak leaf skidded across the porch and stuck to Suki's nose. Suki was a puppy, the color of toast, with one white paw like a sock that didn't match. She shook her head twice and the leaf let go.

Behind the house, the sea breathed in and out. Salt and warm seaweed floated up the cliff path, mixed with something even better, butter and onions and a bird in the oven. It was thanksgiving morning.

Suki knew the word thanksgiving the way she knew the word walk: by the sound of everyone's feet. Feet going up and down the stairs. Feet carrying chairs. Feet stopping to scratch behind her ears.

Mina was on the porch step with scissors and a stack of brown paper. She cut leaf shapes, one after another, and let them drift down around her knees like a small, quiet autumn. "Fourteen leaves," Mina said. "One for everybody."

Suki's tail went thump, thump against the porch boards. She put her chin on Mina's knee, which was how she asked questions.

"That's right," Mina said. "You want to know the rules."

The rules were Grandma Nell's. Everybody in the house wrote one thankful thing on a paper leaf and dropped it in the blue bowl. After the pie, Grandma read them out loud, one at a time, and everybody had to guess whose leaf it was.

"Can Suki have a leaf?" Mina asked. Grandma Nell came out with flour on her cheek. "A pup can't write." "She can hold one," Mina said. So Mina cut one more, the smallest, and tucked it under Suki's paw. Suki carried it everywhere.

But a leaf in a puppy's mouth does not stay a leaf for long. By noon, Suki's leaf was a soft gray rag. She left it under the porch step, where she kept things. A bottle cap. A knuckle of driftwood. Her leaf.

All afternoon the kitchen smelled like a hug. Suki lay in the doorway with her nose working and her ears doing nothing at all. At four o'clock the wind dropped and the sea went flat and silver, the way it does before the light goes. Grandma Nell leaned out the window with flour on her hands. "If it stays this still," she said, "the whales will be humming tonight."

Then Grandma Nell set the blue bowl on the low table and went to find her glasses. The bowl sat right at the edge. Suki looked at it. It was full of paper leaves, and every one of them held a person's best true thing, folded small. She wanted to help carry it. She was almost certain she could help carry it.

She took the rim of the bowl gently in her teeth, the way she carried a stick, and the bowl tipped. Leaves flew. A gust came up off the water and took them sideways and out, over the railing, brown and gold and turning, and the sea took them one by one.

Suki caught the last two in her mouth. She didn't mean to, but they were flying right at her, and a puppy's mouth closes the way a door closes in wind, all at once, before anybody decides.

Then the porch was very quiet. The bowl lay on its side. There was one wet paper ball in Suki's mouth and nothing at all in the bowl. Suki took the paper ball down to the porch step, put it with her other things, and lay on top of it.

By dinnertime, Suki had eaten nothing at all, though a great deal had been offered. Her tail stayed down, and she kept going to the door to look at the porch step, then coming back again. "Pup's off her food," said Grandma Nell, feeling Suki's ears. "And her tail is doing a lot of thinking."

The family sat down. The table had candles on it, and the candles had been lit by Grandma Nell, and the plates were warm. Mina looked into the empty blue bowl and her face changed shape. "The leaves," she said. "They're gone."

Everyone was kind about it. Nobody blamed anybody, because nobody knew anybody to blame. Grandma Nell clicked her tongue. "Well," she said. "Paper's paper. We can say them out loud instead. Who's first?"

So they went around the table, saying their thanks. Dad was thankful for the new roof. Mina said she was thankful for the whole entire day. Suki lay under the chair with her chin flat on the floor and her white paw over her nose, and felt the truth sitting in her chest like a swallowed stone.

She had a secret, and the secret was this: it was her. She had tipped the bowl. She had eaten the leaves. It was the heaviest thing she had ever carried, and the strangest part was that nobody had even thought to look at her.

Mina found her under the chair. Mina didn't say anything. She just lay down on the rug on her stomach, nose to nose, the way she always did when something was wrong and there wasn't a name for it yet.

Suki's tail gave one small thump. Then she got up, went out to the porch step, and came back with her mouth full of wet paper. She put it down in front of Mina, in the middle of the rug, and sat. She didn't wag. She waited.

"Oh," said Mina. "Oh, Suki." She put her hand on Suki's head and left it there, and Suki let out a breath she'd been holding since four o'clock, and it came out as a whine, and the whine turned into a sigh, and the sigh came out lighter than anything.

Grandma Nell came and looked at the wet paper on the rug. She didn't say the word bad and she didn't say the word naughty. She said, "Would you look at that. Bring it to the table. Gently, now."

They unfolded the paper ball on the table by the candles. It came apart in pieces. Every word had run together into one gray-brown blur. Suki put her white paw over her eyes so she couldn't see it.

"Hang on," said Grandma Nell. She peeled the last fold open, and there, on the topmost leaf, one word was still there. The paper was crinkled and soft and the ink had spread, but the letters were plain, and the word was Suki.

Mina laughed out loud. "That's mine! That's the one I wrote. I hid it from you all morning. I wrote your name." And she turned the leaf around so everybody could see that her thanks for the whole entire year had been a small puppy with a mismatched sock.

Suki looked at her own name in the ruined paper, and then at Mina, and then her tail started. It started slow and went faster, and it knocked against the table leg like a drummer who is very pleased with himself.

"Well," said Grandma Nell, holding up the last clean corner of the leaf. "I think that's the first time in fourteen years a thanksgiving leaf got ate and given back at the same time."

After the pie, they carried the pieces of paper down to the water, where the moon was laying a path of silver out across the tide. Grandma Nell held the leash and Mina held the leaves, and they let them go, one at a time, and the little pale pieces rocked and drifted out.

Far off, out where the path of moonlight was widest, a whale hummed. It was a long low hum, low in the middle and rising at the end, like somebody humming a tune while they carried something heavy and set it down.

Suki sat with her white paw on Mina's foot, and her ears went soft, and the sea folded onto the sand, hush, hush, hush, and the leaves went out on the silver. Nobody had to guess whose leaf was whose anymore. Everybody already knew.

Going up the path, Suki yawned so wide that her eyes closed. Behind her the water hummed and hummed, the way it does when the day is done and the tide is full and everything is exactly where it should be.

Mina carried her. Suki's head went heavy on Mina's arm, and her one white paw hung down and swung with each step, and by the top of the path she was asleep, warm and light as a leaf.