I am holding forty-one pounds of turkey, though it is a different weight now than it was this morning, lighter by the parts they have carved and moved into themselves. I hold the plates against the table. I hold the table against the floor. I hold the gravy in the boat and the wine in the glasses at their small tilted angles, and when the youngest one leans too far back in her chair, laughing, I catch the chair and set it down slow.
I always catch the chair.
I hold the grandmother in her seat at the head, which is fifteen pounds less than she was some years ago. I hold her hand steady enough to lift the fork most of the time. I hold her upright even as she dozes between courses, chin dropping, and I lower it gently so the sleep does not startle her.
They keep saying things I cannot verify. One of them says the year has been heavy. Another says her brother is not here and the empty chair feels enormous, and I checked the chair, and it is four pounds, the same as its match beside it. I do not understand. The chair is nearly nothing. Yet I can see her shoulders bearing something down toward the floor, something I did not put there and cannot take away.
So I hold what I am given to hold. The bird. The plates. The old woman and the sleeping child and the four-pound chair that is somehow too much for one of them to lift her eyes past.
I have held every one of them since their first breath in a bright cold room. I held their weight then. I will hold it after the plates are cleared, after the lights, after the last of them who remembers this table.
I do not let go.