Chapter 8 #2
“It was on sale,” James said. “It’s not expired. I checked the date.”
“But you didn’t check whether it was edible,” Thomas said.
Mark ate his lunch and watched them argue about hot sauce, flyers, and who had forgotten to refill the coffee pot.
No one asked if he was serious about Natalie.
No one asked where things were going. No one asked if seeing Jenna’s name on some future Christmas card would still sting.
The teasing skimmed the surface and moved on, leaving him oddly relieved and oddly unsettled at the same time.
They thought he had taken a step forward. Because of that, they had stopped looking at him as if he were standing still.
That evening, the family gathered at his parents’ house again to decorate the Christmas tree.
His mother insisted they did together every year and saw no reason to stop simply because her children were grown, busy, and perfectly capable of decorating their own homes.
Boxes came down from the attic, cookies appeared in the kitchen, and his father untangled lights with a patience Mark respected more each year.
Julia held up a construction-paper angel with one wing folded backward. “Mark, remember when you glued your fingers together making this?”
Mark took the ornament from her and found his name printed crookedly on the back. “I remember everyone being very unhelpful.”
“You cried,” James said from beside the tree.
“I was eight.”
“You cried dramatically,” Thomas added, wrapping lights around the branches. “You wailed.”
Mark hung the angel near the top where the bad wing would not show. “I was attached to construction paper.”
Samuel looked up from an ornament box. “Literally.”
Laughter filled the room, and Mark let himself enjoy it.
A year ago, the joke might have turned toward marriage or Jenna.
Tonight, the teasing moved on to Thomas putting too many red ornaments on one side and Samuel defending tinsel as “misunderstood.” No one asked about his future.
Considering none of his siblings were dating, it hardly seemed fair that most of the teasing was pointed toward him.
At some point, while James argued with Julia about whether the family tree had a theme beyond “sentimental clutter,” Mark found himself looking toward the front window. The Christmas lights reflected against the glass, softening the dark yard outside.
For no sensible reason, he wondered if Winter Wishes was still open and whether Natalie had remembered to eat dinner or had gotten distracted by paperwork, customers, and whatever emotional standards she had assigned to another display.
“You’re smiling,” Samuel said from near the ornament boxes.
Mark looked at him. “No, I’m not.”
Samuel nodded toward him. “You were.”
James immediately turned. “Was he?”
“Briefly,” Samuel said.
Thomas stepped back from the tree and studied Mark with theatrical seriousness. “Interesting.”
“There is nothing interesting about smiling.”
Julia folded her arms. “That depends on who caused it.”
Mark reached for another ornament and hung it with unnecessary concentration. “Nobody caused anything.”
His mother walked past him carrying a tray of cookies and patted his arm. “Of course not.”
He looked down at her. “You don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say that.” She continued toward the coffee table with the serene expression of a woman who believed exactly what she wanted to believe and saw no reason to apologize for it.
His father passed behind Mark with another strand of lights and said quietly, “Might be easier to let them enjoy themselves.”
“At my expense?”
His father smiled. “Families need hobbies.”
Mark huffed a laugh despite himself and took the next strand of lights from him.
The misunderstanding should have felt like a trap.
It should have made him defensive, restless, eager to set everyone straight before Mrs. Barlow’s version of events became town history.
Instead, it gave the room a different kind of warmth.
His family was still nosy and impossible and entirely too pleased by the possibility that he had spent an afternoon with Natalie Winters and failed to hate it, but they were not worried.
For the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, his mother’s eyes looked lighter when she glanced his way.
He would tell the truth soon. Just not while his mother was smiling like that, not while his siblings were teasing him without pity, and not while the lie felt less like deception and more like borrowing a little peace for one evening.
Mark hung the last string of lights and stepped back with the rest of them as his father plugged everything in.
The tree glowed to life, uneven in places, crowded with old ornaments and years of stories.
Samuel gave a quiet approving nod, Julia declared the red ornaments unbalanced, James told her no one cared, and Thomas offered to fix it badly enough that she’d stop complaining.
Mark laughed with them.
Across the room, his mother watched him over the rim of her coffee cup, smiling as if she had noticed every bit of it.
He looked away first. He didn’t know what to do with the realization that, for the first time in a long while, maybe they weren’t entirely mistaken.