42. Natalie
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Natalie
Our first Christmas back together fell on a Sunday, and Daniel insisted, over my mild objections, on getting the tree the old way, the way we'd done it the first few years of our marriage before the company grew large enough to eat every December weekend: driving out to the same scrubby tree farm outside Franklin, tromping through half-frozen mud with both kids arguing loudly about which tree was objectively the best one, and hauling home something slightly too large for the living room the way we always somehow ended up doing.
"We could just buy a reasonable-sized tree from the lot on Hillsboro Pike," I pointed out, not for the first time, watching Jack attempt to wrap his entire body around a tree easily twice his height in a gesture of premature ownership.
"Where's the fun in reasonable?" Daniel said, hefting the saw over his shoulder with the specific enthusiasm of a man determined to enjoy every single overwrought detail of an ordinary family tradition. "Besides, Maddie's picked this one. I'm contractually obligated."
"I didn't pick it, Jack's just sitting on it," Maddie said, though she was smiling, arms crossed against the cold, watching her little brother's antics with the specific fond exasperation of an older sibling secretly enjoying the show.
We spent that evening decorating, the same box of ornaments we'd accumulated over eleven years pulled down from the attic, Jack's kindergarten handprint ornament that had somehow survived three moves and one nearly catastrophic dishwasher incident, the glass angel Daniel's mother had given us our first married Christmas, the ugly ceramic Santa Maddie had made in preschool that we all secretly loved precisely because it was so aggressively ugly.
Daniel put on the same scratchy Christmas record his father had given us years ago, and at some point, somewhere between the second string of lights and Jack's third attempt to eat a candy cane meant for the tree, I looked around at my family, all four of us, laughing over a tangle of ornament hooks, and felt something so complete it was almost disorienting after the year we'd had.
"You okay?" Daniel asked quietly, catching me watching them.
"I'm better than okay." I leaned into him, his arm coming around my waist automatically, easily, the way it always had before any of this happened and the way it had again, now, on entirely different and sturdier terms. "I was just thinking about how close we came to not having this.
This exact ordinary, chaotic, wonderful mess of a night. "
"I think about that more than I probably should," he admitted.
"Every ordinary night like this one, some part of me still catches on how easily I could have lost it.
I don't think that feeling's going away anytime soon.
I'm not sure I want it to, honestly. Feels like the thing that keeps me honest."
We hosted both sets of parents on Christmas Day itself, the house full to bursting, my father teaching Jack a card game at the kitchen table while my mother and Daniel's mother compared notes on a knitting pattern neither of them would ever actually finish, Daniel's father dozing in the recliner with the specific contentment of a man who had earned the right to nap through his grandchildren's chaos.
Ben came by in the afternoon with a girlfriend none of us had met yet, a quiet, sharp-witted woman named Priya who worked in structural engineering and clearly found the entire Kessler family's dynamic both baffling and delightful in equal measure.
"So you're the wife who came back," she said to me at one point, entirely without malice, the blunt curiosity of someone new enough to the family not to have learned the careful vocabulary everyone else used around the subject.
"That's one way to put it," I said, laughing despite myself.
"Ben told me some of it. For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty good story.
Not the part where it almost fell apart.
The part where you both apparently decided it was worth actually rebuilding instead of just walking away or pretending nothing happened.
" She shrugged, entirely unbothered by her own directness.
"Most people don't do the second part. They do one or the other. "
I thought about that comment for the rest of the evening, turning it over while Jack tore through wrapping paper with the specific violence of a six-year-old on Christmas morning's actual day, while Maddie carefully organized her new art supplies by color the way she organized everything, while Daniel sat on the floor assembling a toy that had come with instructions clearly written by someone who had never actually attempted to follow them.
Later that night, once the house had finally emptied out and the kids were asleep, exhausted from a full day of chaos and sugar, Daniel and I sat together on the couch surrounded by the wreckage of wrapping paper neither of us had the energy to clean up yet, the tree lights the only illumination in the room.
"Best Christmas we've had in years," he said.
"Best one we've had, period," I said. "On the surface, nothing about today was actually different from other years. I was just here, completely, the whole time. I wasn't keeping score in my head."
"Good," he said, pressing a kiss to my hair. "I want boring Christmases with you for the next fifty years."
"You're assembling the toys next year, then." I let my head fall against his shoulder, smiling when he groaned, and watched the tree lights blur soft and warm at the edges of my vision.