That was when panic began to set in. Not panic about the dinner, which seemed too enormous to process yet. Panic about his wife, who always answered her phone, who never went anywhere without telling him exactly where she would be and when she would return.
He called her sister Carmen.
“Hudson? It’s early. Is everything okay?”
“Is Isabella with you? Did someone in your family— is there an emergency?”
“What? No. Everyone’s fine. Why would Isabella be here? Isn’t she cooking your Thanksgiving feast?”
The way Carmen said your Thanksgiving feast carried an edge he had never noticed before, like she knew something about their holiday arrangements that she did not approve of.
“She left a note saying she had to leave town. I thought maybe she left because—”
“Isabella just left?”
Carmen’s voice shifted from sleepy confusion to something that sounded almost like admiration.
“Good for her.”
“Good for her? Carmen, thirty people are coming for dinner in six hours and she’s vanished.”
“Thirty people? Hudson, are you insane? You expected your wife to cook for thirty people by herself?”
The judgment in her voice stung.
“She’s good at this stuff. She likes hosting.”
“She likes hosting intimate dinners with friends, not feeding an army of your relatives who treat her like hired help.”
Hudson ended the call, disturbed by Carmen’s reaction.
Why was everyone acting like this was somehow his fault?
He tried Isabella’s phone again.
Voicemail.
8:15 a.m.
His conference call with Singapore started in forty-five minutes. The call he could not miss. The one that could determine his promotion timeline for the next year.
But thirty-two people were expecting dinner in less than six hours.
He opened the refrigerator and stared at the contents.
The raw turkeys looked back at him accusingly.
He had never cooked a turkey in his life. He had never cooked anything more complicated than scrambled eggs.
His phone rang.
His mother.
“Good morning, darling. How are the preparations coming along? Is Isabella managing the timeline properly?”
“Mom, we have a problem.”
“What kind of problem? Did she burn something already? I told you we should have hired a caterer for a dinner this size.”
“Isabella’s gone.”
Silence.
Then, “Gone where?”
“I don’t know. She left a note saying something came up and she had to leave town. She’s not answering her phone.”
“That’s impossible. Isabella would never abandon a dinner party, especially not today. There must be some misunderstanding.”
Hudson looked at the note again, as if it might have changed.
“There’s no misunderstanding. She’s gone, and we have thirty-two people coming for dinner.”
The silence stretched so long that Hudson wondered if the call had dropped.
“Mother, this is a disaster.”
Her voice had gone cold and sharp.
“An absolute disaster. What kind of wife abandons her family on Thanksgiving?”
Something about the way she said it, the immediate assumption that Isabella was the villain in this scenario, made Hudson defensive in a way that surprised him.
“Maybe she had an emergency. Maybe something happened that she couldn’t—”
“What emergency requires someone to abandon thirty-two dinner guests without any notice? What emergency prevents someone from answering their phone to explain the situation?”
Hudson did not have an answer to that.
“We need to fix this immediately,” Vivien continued, her voice taking on the command tone she used when managing family crises. “Call every decent restaurant in town. See if any of them can prepare an emergency Thanksgiving dinner for thirty-two people.”
Hudson spent the next hour on the phone with restaurants, catering companies, and hotels. Every conversation went the same way. Laughter, followed by the information that their Thanksgiving dinners had been booked for months.
“Sir,” said the manager of the Hilton, “it’s nine a.m. on Thanksgiving. Even if we had availability, which we don’t, there’s no way to prepare a dinner for thirty-two people with five hours’ notice.”
By ten a.m., Hudson had exhausted every professional option. His Singapore conference call had come and gone, ignored. He had probably damaged his relationship with his biggest client, but that seemed secondary to the immediate crisis.
He called his mother back.
“Any luck with the restaurants?”
“Nothing. Everyone’s booked.”
“What do we do?”
“We cook it ourselves, obviously.”
Hudson looked at the raw turkeys again.
“Mom, I don’t know how to cook a turkey. I don’t know how to cook any of this.”
“Then you learn. YouTube exists. How hard can it be?”
Vivien arrived with her sleeves rolled up and a grim expression that suggested she was preparing for battle. She surveyed the kitchen like a general assessing a battlefield where all the soldiers had deserted.
“This is worse than I thought,” she announced. “These turkeys should have been in the oven four hours ago. They’ll never be ready in time.”
Hudson, who had spent the last hour watching YouTube videos about turkey preparation while growing increasingly panicked, looked up from his phone with desperate hope.
“Can we cook them faster somehow? Higher temperature?”
“Hudson, darling, you cannot rush a twenty-pound turkey. Physics doesn’t bend to accommodate your wife’s abandonment issues.”
They worked in tense silence for the next hour, Vivien barking instructions while Hudson fumbled through tasks that Isabella had always made look effortless. The stuffing ingredients sat in bowls looking like components for a science experiment neither of them understood. The green bean casserole recipe might as well have been written in ancient Greek.
“Where is the stand mixer?” Vivien demanded, rifling through cabinets.
“I don’t know. Isabella always handles the kitchen stuff.”
“Well, Isabella isn’t here, is she?”
At noon, Hudson’s phone started ringing with calls from relatives asking about arrival times and dietary restrictions. Each conversation became more uncomfortable than the last.
“Hey, Hudson, it’s Uncle Raymond. Should I bring something? I know Vivien said everything was covered, but my wife made extra stuffing just in case.”
“Actually, Uncle Raymond, maybe you should bring the stuffing. And maybe anything else your wife might have made. As backup.”
“Backup? Is everything okay?”
Hudson looked at his mother, who was attempting to wrestle a raw turkey into a roasting pan while muttering under her breath.
“Just bring whatever you have.”
By twelve-thirty, word had spread through the family network that something was wrong with dinner preparations. Hudson’s phone buzzed constantly with confused relatives offering to help, asking questions, or trying to figure out if they should make alternative plans.
The kitchen had descended into chaos. Vivien had managed to get one turkey into the oven, but it was clear to both of them that it would not be ready until evening. The side dishes remained untouched. The elegant timeline Isabella always maintained had collapsed into panic and improvisation.
“This is humiliating,” Vivien said, flour in her hair and defeat in her voice. “Absolutely humiliating. The Sanders are going to think we’re incompetent.”
“Maybe we should just cancel,” Hudson suggested weakly.
“Cancel? We cannot cancel Thanksgiving dinner at one p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Do you have any idea what people will think?”
But Hudson was beginning to realize that what people thought was the least of his problems.
The doorbell rang like a death knell.
Hudson opened the door to find Cousin Cynthia and her new boyfriend standing on the porch with a bottle of wine and expectant smiles.
“Something smells interesting,” Cynthia said, sniffing the air with obvious confusion.
