Chapter 17 #2
Couldn’t the same be said of me? I didn’t surround myself with ornamentation, I surrounded myself with work, with balance sheets and contracts and so much money.
And balance sheets couldn’t give me a hug, and contracts didn’t care whether I succeeded or failed.
Wasn’t that what Alaric had spent the last forty-eight hours systematically trying to dismantle?
My obsession with soulless and meaningless matters?
He glanced over, a flash of vulnerability leaking through. “No one loves Duke enough to try to help him. No one cares about him enough to intervene, to show him how to become a better person. Don’t you think that’s sad? He doesn’t even love himself.”
He waited, searching my face for a reaction.
I searched his in return, and saw in the hard lines of his mouth the same bleak arithmetic I’d spent my whole trying to confront and fix.
Maybe the only thing worse than being alone was being surrounded by people and still feeling like an ornament, a shiny, breakable thing on someone else’s shelf.
We drove for a while, neither of us needing to fill the space with noise, and we entered into another of our comfortable silences.
I thought about Sawyer, about all the Christmases ahead and the ones we’d lost, about what it meant to belong and to forgive.
I watched Alaric’s hands steady on the wheel, his profile outlined by the landscape, and I realized I wanted to be present for someone.
Sawyer when she needed me, even when she didn’t.
Definitely Renee. My old friends in Boston.
Perhaps some new friends in Chicago. . . ? Maybe one day.
And then there was Alaric.
Where before I’d hesitated, worried I’d get it wrong, now I reached out and placed my hand on his, right where his thumb pressed into the steering wheel. He didn’t startle or tense. He just let it rest there, warm and solid and, yes, awkwardly placed. But also well intentioned.
“Thank you for telling me all of that.” I gave him a tight smile when he looked my way.
He covered my hand with one of his, plucked it from the steering wheel, and brought it to his lips for a soft kiss. Then, keeping it captured, brought it to his leg and pressed my palm to his thigh. We drove on, heading toward whatever version of Christmas waited for us, the road unwinding ahead.
* * *
Although I’d already reached the day’s quota for intimacy and self-awareness, I used the rest of our drive to rewind and replay what Alaric had said about Duke, how no one loved or cared about him enough to intervene.
Isn’t that what Alaric is doing with me now? A small voice asked, over and over. And does that mean he loves me?
I peeked at him a few times, and he caught me a few times, but neither of us spoke. I liked him, a lot. And by his own admission, he liked me, a lot. So, what were we doing here? And once the three days ended, what would we be?
Hopefully horizontal. Boo-ya!
Now I channeled my inner Sawyer to roll my eyes at myself.
I didn’t realize we’d arrived at our next destination until Alaric braked abruptly and turned into a driveway so aggressively festooned, it would have made the Whos of Whoville feel inferior.
The house was a two-story rancher, but the garland and floodlights and giant inflatable reindeer team gave it the dimensions of a nuclear bunker disguised as a seasonal attraction.
I counted five different illuminated Santa figures before we even parked.
“This is really something. . .” Blinded by the red-white-green laser grid projected onto the garage, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.
He just grinned and opened my door for me.
The air smelled of electrical transformer. I followed him up the walkway. He rang the doorbell, and somewhere inside, an entire choir of fake children erupted into a synthetic, tinny “Deck the Halls.” It kept going for the full verse.
The door was yanked open mid-falalalala, and there stood a woman who looked vaguely familiar, beaming at us.
Her hair, styled in a compact helmet of tight curls, sported a holly pin the size of a hockey puck.
She wore a red sweater with a blinking Rudolph nose over one breast (the nose was positioned at the center boobular area), and a plaid skirt that may have predated women’s suffrage.
A man, presumably her husband, hovered in the background, one hand clutching a tumbler of something brown.
“Oh, there they are! Merry Christmas, come in, come in!” the woman ushered us inside with both arms, the urgency in her voice making it clear that the party had already started without us.
The interior was somehow even more saturated with décor than the exterior.
Every horizontal surface bore a snowman, a pinecone craft, or a bowl of candies, and every vertical one a hand-stitched or painted sign with slogans like “BELIEVE IN MAGIC” and “LET IT SNOW” and, my favorite, “JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON, BUT PRESENTS ARE FUN TOO.”
“I’m Sal, you can call me Sal,” the woman said. Then she flicked a hand toward the older gentleman at her shoulder. “That’s Terri. He’s my first husband.”
Not knowing what to do with that information and what it meant, I opened my mouth to respond with something, but we were interrupted.
“Alison Weston.”
I turned and immediately recognized Rex McMurtry, wearing an appalling Christmas sweater and gray sweatpants, strolling toward us.
Rex had been big in highschool, but he resembled a mountain now.
I knew he’d retired from the Chicago Squalls a few years ago, but apparently he still took his workouts seriously.
The big guy’s eyes moved over me, brimming with disbelief.
“You’re actually here,” he said, his eyes shifting to Alaric. “You were telling the truth.”
Alaric shared a brief, meaningful look with his friend, then stepped close to me and placed a hand on my back.
And Rex’s eyes grew three times that day.
“Alison, you remember Rex. This is Sal and Terri, his aunt and uncle.”
Puzzle pieces fell into place and, now that the couple’s identities had been revealed, I felt myself relax.
But then a gorgeous—and I mean freaking ridiculously attractive—redheaded woman walked in the room. Before I could recover from the reality of her presence, she walked up to me and pulled me into a hug.
“Oh my goodness! When Alaric said you were coming, I thought it was lie.” She pulled back and grinned down at me. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Do I—do I know you?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound rude because she seemed really nice, and she smelled like cookies.
I remained in a bit of a daze as it was explained to me that this beautiful woman was someone I went to high school with.
Her name was Abby but had gone by Abigail back then.
Furthermore it was explained that she and Rex had married a couple years ago and now had two children.
And, speak of darlings and they shall appear, two adorable little boys ran into the room, wanting their grandpa to help them with the trains.
Sal intervened, swooping in to wrap her arm through mine. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, gesturing at the house with a sweep of her hand. “I reorganized everything for the boys this year. I want their childhoods to be magical.”
“They’ll only remember the candy and the trains,” Terry muttered from behind her, sipping his drink.
“They’ll have the best memories,” Sal insisted. Then, with no warning, she clapped her hands and declared, “Sweaters! We can’t do anything without the sweaters. Alison, Alaric, follow me.”
She led us down a hall lined with tinsel, past a string gallery of every Christmas card she’d received this year, and into a small den that had been converted into a makeshift coat check-slash-gift wrapping station.
There, on a table, was a stack of hand-knitted, aggressively ugly sweaters, each carefully folded and topped with a gift tag.
I picked up the one with my name on it. It was navy with a massive snowflake stitched across the chest.
“I didn’t know your colors,” Sally confessed.
I nodded, a quip dying on my tongue as I saw the hopeful, beatific pride on her face.
Alaric’s sweater was somehow worse. A yeti holding a gift wrapped present, but the yeti’s lips had been stitched red, which made it seem like it had just finished eating a bloody dinner before posing for the sweater pattern.
“Oh my god,” I whispered.
He looked at me, deadpan. “Is this too sexy for me to wear in front of you? Will you be able to control yourself?”
Sal beamed at us, delighted with her work. “Let’s get you into those, and then you’ll come with me for the tour.”
We obliged. I slid on the snowflake sweater, which was surprisingly soft but also instantly about twenty degrees too warm. Alaric donned the atrocity she’d made for him, and I had to admit, he was damn sexy.
Sal walked me back toward the living room, one arm linked in mine. She started the tour immediately, stopping every two inches to point out a specific object and recount the story attached.
“See this nutcracker? Rex made it in the third grade. He glued his fingers together and tried to convince me it was a war wound.” She laughed, apparently the memory as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
I nodded politely, ready for the tour to be over, but Sally pressed on. “Here’s a cross-stitch from my mother. I cried for a week after she passed, and then Terri hung it up so she could still spend Christmas with us.”
Some of my impatience dissolved. “That’s. . . really sweet.”
“Here’s the first ornament Rex ever got from a girlfriend.
He didn’t want me to hang it after they broke up, but I told him, people come and go, but memories last, and we must learn from mistakes.
We shouldn’t be afraid to confront our mistakes, and so I hang up the ornament every year.
” She patted my hand, then added, “I remember every single story in this house.”
We stopped in front of a small, wooden nativity, barely larger than a shoebox, tucked between a snowman and a bowl of sugared pecans. The figures were primitive, almost folk-art crude.
I peered at the little nativity, and Sally grinned. “Rex made that,” she said. “He did. I swear. And he was just thirteen years old. He wanted to learn how to whittle. So, I taught him. Of course, I had to learn first.”
I looked back at her, searching her face for the catch or the punchline. Instead, she looked back at me, eyes bright and earnest.
Sally’s hand found my shoulder. “You’d be a wonderful whittler,” she told me, “if you ever wanted to learn.”
My stomach did a strange, complicated thing that I refused to label. “Thank you,” I said, quietly.
She smiled, then pivoted back into her usual tempo, rattling off the provenance of every snow globe, every signed greeting card, every accidental tradition that had become, by virtue of repetition, a family legend.
By the time we’d made it halfway around the room, I was starting to sweat in the snowflake sweater, but I was also starting to appreciate the weird, layered history embedded in all the ornamentation.
It wasn’t about taste, or even about a holiday, not really.
It was about memorializing the love she’d poured into the people in her life.