A turkey in the Decker oven! Mr. Decker surveyed the great fellow in silence for a few minutes, then said impressively, "If we don't have a new cook stove before another Thanksgiving day comes around, my name is not Decker."
Mrs. Job Smith left her pies half-made, and ran in, in a friendly way, to see the wonder; and at once remarked that he would exactly fit into their oven, and she wasn't going to cook their turkey till the day afterwards, because they had got to go to Job's uncle's for Thanksgiving; so that matter was settled. It was then that the Deckers decided to make a reckless plunge into society and invite every boy in Norm's shop to a three o'clock dinner, with turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and turnip, and all the rest.
What a day it was! They grew nearly wild in their efforts to keep all the secrets from Norm, and act as though nothing unusual was happening. Especially was this the case after the morning express brought a package for Nettie from her dear old home, with two mince pies, and a box of Auntie Marshall's doughnuts, and a bag of nuts, and as much as two pounds of the loveliest candy she ever saw; sent by the young man of the home who was clerk in a wholesale confectioner's. It took Mrs. Decker and Nettie not five minutes to resolve, looking curiously into each other's faces the while to see if they really had become insane, that they would have a regular dessert following the dinner!
"It is only once a year," said Nettie apologetically.
"It is only once in five years!" said Mrs. Decker solemnly. "I haven't had a Thanksgiving in five years, child; and I never expected to have another."
Everybody was busy all day long. Mrs. Smith was in and out, helping as faithfully as though Norm was her boy, and Sarah Ann just gave herself up to the importance of the occasion, and did not go to her uncle's at all. "I can go there any time," she said good naturedly, "or no time; they always forget that we are alive till Thanksgiving Day, and then they ask us because they kind of think they've got to. Uncle Jed is a clerk, and his wife makes dresses for the folks on Belmont street, and they feel stuck up four feet above us; I'd rather eat cold pork and potatoes at home than to go there any day. I'm dreadful glad of an excuse that father thinks is worth giving."
Susie was a young woman of importance that day. Nettie, who had discovered exactly how to manage her, gave her work to do which suited her ideas of what a grown person like herself ought to be about; and when she wanted the table cleared from the picture papers of the night before, instead of telling Miss Susie to fold them away, said, "What do you think, Susie, would it be best for us to fold these papers away in the closet for to-day, and have this table left clear for the nuts and the candies?"
"Yes," said Susie, with her grown-up air, "I think it would; I'll attend to it." And she did it beautifully.
"It is well we have no little bits of folks around," said Nettie, when the nuts were being cracked, "they would be tempted to eat some, and then I'm afraid we would not have enough to go around." And Susie, gravely assenting to this theory, arranged the nuts in Mrs. Smith's blue saucers, an equal number in each, and ate not one!