7. Charlie
7
Charlie
Somehow through the years I’ve managed not to draw her in the secret Santa game, so the last gift I gave Bea was our final Christmas as a couple, eight years ago.
It was a disaster. Worst holiday ever, and only partly because I didn’t come home for Christmas for the first time.
At Stanford, I still needed money for all the small expenses my scholarship didn’t cover. I worked a retail job, and the manager had offered me additional hours during their busiest time of year. My parents had been disappointed but understood—Bea was a different story. I told her that if I worked over the Christmas break, the wages, bonuses, and tips would carry me through the summer.
“So you’ll be home this summer?” Bea had asked.
“For a few weeks,” I said.
She’d gone silent. Dangerously silent. And then we’d argued about it for hours.
“I miss you. Come home. We can live together and save more money.” This was her constant position, that everything would be better if I abandoned the opportunity that I’d worked for, the money that was handed to me, and came home.
“And go where? Alabama doesn’t have any schools that compare to Stanford. And I’ve already got a mentor and he’s helping me choose a summer internship. This was always my plan.”
“But I never see you. We don’t even talk anymore. I’m building this life here and you’re building one there and how will they ever be the same?”
“I don’t know!”
Even as angry as we were, we stayed together for a few more weeks. I thought sending the necklace would help, that it would remind her of how much I loved her every time she wore it.
Instead it was the final nail in the coffin. Bea and I barely wished each other a Merry Christmas when Mom passed the phone around, and her whispered “Thank you” after opening my present was sad.
The next week, we broke up.
You know what they say about long-distance relationships: they never work.
I tuck the paper into my pocket without looking at Bea. After the names are all drawn, the party moves to the kitchen and resumes while Bea and her sisters jockey over doing the dishes (because whoever doesn’t clean up tonight has to clean up after Jasper tomorrow night; he’ll be cooking dinner and baking up a storm) while the rest of us help ourselves to the store-bought sugar cookies.
“Not as good as yours,” I say, and Jasper raises his cookie to me in a salute.
I end up next to my dad. He’s shorter than me, shaved bald and with a neatly trimmed goatee. Working in the Frito-Lay factory gave him a stocky build and for most of my life, I remember him as a fit man, stripping off his back brace when he got home from work. Now he’s still exercising, but he has the paunch of a man whose body is succumbing to age.
“Hey, Dad.”
His lips tip up in what passes for a smile. He’s a quiet man, the opposite of Erik. “How’s your new place?”
“Really nice. I have a great view.” My new condo in the city is a block off Central Park, and I can see patches of the green expanse if I angle my head just right. I lower my tone and step closer to my dad so no one else can hear. “When are you going to let me improve your view?”
He grunts and crosses his arms. Mom and Dad still live in the same house we moved to when I was sixteen and Dad got laid off. When we had to move away from the Cummingses. “There’s nothing wrong with our house.”
I bite my tongue on criticizing it. It’s cluttered, but with my mom that’s par for the course. She collects a lot of shit and the yard in front of the run-down two-bedroom house is full of tchotchkes, and the roof over the tiny front porch sags under all of Mom’s wind chimes.
“Mom could quit working if you let me buy you a house. They’re so cheap in Mobile, I can buy you one back in Morning Dale.” That’s the neighborhood where we used to live next door to Bea’s family—the one they still live in.
Dad’s gaze meets mine. “That argument would hold more weight if you actually got your mother on board first.”
Okay, so Mom loves waitressing at the diner. She likes chatting with the regulars and thinks she makes good money in tips. The reality is that she makes a pittance and she’s fifty-eight; she can’t stay on her feet forever.
“Besides,” Dad says, his voice sharpening. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you went way over budget on this house.”
“I am perfectly on budget on the house.”
Dad shakes his head. “The lift passes, the decorations, the food delivery,” he fumes. “We had an agreement.”
“Our agreement was that I would limit what I spent on the house. I did.”
He rolls his eyes. “If you think I’m going to let that loophole slide, you’ve got another think comin’, son.”
“Fine,” I bite out. “Believe what you want. I—” I shut down my retort when I see Jasper breaking away from the rest of the group and approaching us. When he gets here, he crosses his arms and hunches over, brows scrunched down. “What are we talking about? Global warming? Mass extinction? The systematic degradation of individual rights?”
I glance down at myself. Just like my dad, I have my arms crossed and my shoulders curved in. Simultaneously, Dad and I straighten and drop our arms.
Jasper grins and does the same. He’s taller than me, with dark skin from his Jamaican parents and a close-trimmed fade and a beard.
“How’s life back in Tampa?” I ask, diverting the conversation away from anything that will get our hackles up again.
“Good. Kayla is gearing up for the slew of newly engaged brides who need her makeup artistry for their photoshoots. All the holiday proposals, you know.”
“Romantic,” Dad says gruffly.
“I’m surprised you could get away from the restaurant,” I comment. Jasper didn’t join us last year because restaurants are so busy over the holidays.
“I quit,” he says.
It’s flippant, which is so like him, but my jaw drops and my eyebrows come together. “What are you going to do?”
“After the holidays, I’ll look for a new job. Something with better hours.” Now it’s his turn to cross his arms, and he pops his hip against the counter where we’re standing.
At least, until his wife calls across the room. “Babe,” Kayla says, widening her eyes and looking at my dad.
“Oh, right.” Jasper straightens. “I need to run to the store. Can I get your keys, or do you mind moving your car for me?”
“What do you need from the store?” Dad asks. “I can get it for you.”
My dad loves to run to the store. And my mom is pretty forgetful, so my parents’ day-to-day life is my mom forgetting to buy things at the store and my dad running to get them for her.
“Nothing,” Jasper says quickly. Too quickly. “Just, you know...women’s stuff.”
Dad levels him with a gaze. He may not have had a daughter himself, but he’s been around the Cummings family enough. “I’ve bought pads and tampons for every woman in this house before. What kind?”
Jasper sighs, eyes rolling to the ceiling. “It’s not tampons. Can you just move your car so I can get the rental out?”
“Nope.” My dad has a really dry sense of humor when he wants to and razzing Jasper is his favorite time to whip it out.
“Shit.” Jasper rubs his eyebrows. “Fine, it’s...I forgot to get decaf coffee.”
My gaze immediately goes to Kayla, and Dad turns enough that I know he’s looking at her too. She’s sitting with her mom and Bea, laughing and drinking a clear, carbonated beverage. Not wine, like everyone else.
Kayla’s on the softer side, and she’s wearing jeans and a blouse, so I can’t tell if she’s showing.
When I look back at Jasper, he’s pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Dude,” I whisper out the side of my mouth. “You could have just said decaf in the first place without being all sus about it, and we probably wouldn’t have said anything.” I clear my throat and return to normal volume. “Well, maybe not. Drinking decaf is weird. Nevertheless, now I’m like ninety-five percent sure I’m going to be an uncle.”
“Don’t.” He sighs again. “We’re still in the first trimester.” He runs a hand down his face. “Kayla’s going to kill me.”
My dad’s face splits into the biggest grin. A heart-achingly wide grin so large I can count his fillings. He leans over and clasps Jasper on the shoulder before digging the car keys out of his pocket. “Better run before she catches you. We won’t say a word.”
Jasper beats a hasty retreat and my dad schools his face. We lean against the counter behind us, side by side.
“It’s starting,” Dad marvels. “The next generation.”
I look at Bea. She’s drinking white wine, holding the stem in one hand, elbow propped up on the other hand banded under her breasts. Her dimples are out in full force, her golden hair tumbling down in waves to brush the carmine sweater she wears.
She looks like Christmas magic.
If we’d stayed together, maybe we would have had the first kid. Years ago, we might have announced at Christmas that Bea was pregnant. There would, by now, be a toddler to buy gifts for and four grandparents who would fight over babysitting.
The image is so thick in my head I have to blink it away, this vision of another Christmas that will never come to pass.
The first grandchild will be someone else’s.