Chapter 22
T he following Friday, Drake suggested they sit out the cinema a second time.
“In fact, I don’t think we should go back,” he said, sitting next to her at the kitchen table and nibbling on some leftovers.
Ellie weighed what would remain for them to see on her side of the story.
Family feuds. One-night stands. Being impulsive through her twenties until she landed right here.
Drake was the best thing that happened to her since Ben died.
Maybe it was better to stay in the present than relive the rest of it.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Fine by me. I saw what I went there for.”
“Good.” Drake nodded. “I have my mom’s Early Christmas Dinner thing tomorrow night, anyway.” He put his arm around her. “I was thinking I could head out there, leave early, and come home with armfuls of leftovers.”
Ellie was familiar with Early Christmas Dinner.
The superfluous event was a chance for the Nielsons to gather and officially kick the holiday off before it happened.
To mark the occasion, Beth regaled everyone with the three holiday carols she could play on the keyboard, and Drake banged away on a triangle instrument he’d been given as a child.
The evening wasn’t a replacement for Christmas, merely an opening act.
Last year, she would’ve loved to have skipped it. But now, Ellie didn’t want to be alone. Sitting in the quiet house with only her thoughts sounded too unbearable.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“You really don’t have to do that,” Drake insisted. “You’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I know it’s not your thing. You can come to real Christmas.”
“No,” she pushed. “I want to come.”
“It’s okay if you—”
“I’m coming to dinner, Drake,” she said. “With bells on.”
To make good on her promise, Ellie found a dress with literal bells on the sleeves for Early Christmas Dinner.
When Robert opened the door in his holiday sweatpants, she realized she’d overdressed.
The three of them jingled their way through hugs and hellos.
The kitchen’s small dinner table was set up with festive paper plates and a homemade reindeer centerpiece featuring buttons for eyes.
Before Ellie and Drake sat down, the table started to tilt as it always did.
The silverware came dangerously close to hitting the floor.
“Oh boy, here we go,” Robert said. “Table on the run.”
“Do we need to have another talk about replacing the table?” Drake asked.
“No,” his dad insisted. “No. We’re not replacing the table.”
“Why not?” Drake argued. “It’s broken. It’s always been broken.”
“Kids!” Beth shouted from the hall, her hands in the air. “Oh good, we’re fixing the table, how fun!”
“This isn’t fun, Mom,” Drake said. He bent to start repairing the leg. Ellie chuckled, charmed by the routine.
“How about when you get that table all squared away, you make the front door jealous?” Beth suggested with a pat on Drake’s back. The front door hadn’t been closing properly for a week, she explained, which was likely the reason for the chill inside.
While Drake went to work on the door, Beth pulled Ellie down the hall toward his room for her design expertise.
They were slowly turning Drake’s room into a home gym, Beth explained, even though Ellie already knew this from their last several visits.
His bed was still in its place, but it was now accompanied by more rogue exercise equipment than Ellie remembered.
At the center of the room was a tiny trampoline most appropriate for a cat.
“I don’t know a lot about decorating gyms,” Ellie said. This was an understatement.
Beth ignored her comment. “I need something to liven it up in here.” She gestured toward a blank white wall.
Ellie wanted to be helpful. “Maybe you could do a simple mural?” she suggested. “You know, a word that inspires you, or—”
Beth smiled and snapped her fingers. “Ooh, babies!” she said. “I have some framed Anne Geddes babies in Drake’s closet. Do you think that might work?”
Ellie swallowed the laughter that was trying to escape.
“Yeah,” she said. “Nothing says home gym like Anne Geddes.” It came out with more bite than she meant, but Beth didn’t seem to notice.
She was already sorting through the closet with determination.
A large cardboard box was right in her way, bulging from the sides.
As soon as Beth bent to grab it, Ellie darted over to help.
It was terrifically heavy; her shoulders retaliated as she picked up one side.
There must have been stones in there, Ellie thought.
Mallets. Dozens of nesting dolls. “What’s in this thing? ” she asked.
“Oh, it’s the photo albums I made of Drake over the years,” Beth said with a proud smile. “I used to love scrapbooking.”
Ellie eyed the box once it was situated at the center of the room. She tapped on the lid. “Do you mind if I have a look?”
“Of course not,” Beth told her. She continued digging through the closet, calling out to Ellie from behind the door, “There are some great memories in there.”
Ellie wiggled free the tape on the lid of the box and pulled the first album out. Closest to the top was a scrapbook labeled
DRAKE TWENTIES . The cover was decorated with too much fanfare and big cutout letters.
Ellie got comfortable on the bed. A certain sadness came over her as she flipped through the pages.
They weren’t going back to the cinema. These pictures were the closest she would get to seeing Drake at this life phase.
Here he was holding a giant plastic fish inside an apartment she didn’t recognize. Then, a little older, at work. Drake looked so proud to be building homes in his neighborhood. Homes that would last. It was a pride Ellie had never seen in his current role. How could she help him get back there?
“It’s relaxing, kind of,” Beth was saying.
“Huh?” Ellie asked, mesmerized.
“Scrapbooking. It’s good to do something with your hands. That’s what they say.”
“Right.”
And then, when Ellie least expected it, even though she should’ve expected it, there was Melinda.
There were pages of Melinda, actually. The album had been mislabeled.
It should have been called THE MELINDA ALBUM .
Drake had just told her there was nothing to worry about; that it was some young, nonserious romance.
Yet right before her, Ellie watched years of their relationship expand before her eyes.
Drake and Melinda were happy, so very happy, in each photo.
They were camping in the woods. They were posed around their small town.
They were sharing a ham with Beth over a holiday dinner, so casually, as if Melinda were always at that table.
The photos gave away more than the memories Ellie had seen.
She closed the book about a third of the way to the end. She couldn’t handle any more of it.
“I know that maybe I shouldn’t ask this, but … what happened between Drake and Mel—”
The oven timer sounded in the distance before she could finish her question. Beth gave up her search, and Ellie followed her into the kitchen. A ham flew out of the oven—a ham just like the one she’d seen Melinda posed with in the photographs. “What were you saying back there, hon?” Beth asked.
“Nothing,” Ellie said. “It smells delicious.” She hated ham.
Beth set a hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “Only my very favorite people get a ham,” she told her. Then, the front door clicked shut. Drake was done with his repair work.
“Say goodbye to the gust,” he said, and shot Ellie a wink.
Sitting through dinner was miserable, even though Drake gave her the floor to talk about her show with a captive audience.
Beth had a million questions about the potential job as the second-most avid viewer of home renovation programming.
They passed around an ambrosia salad Beth had forgotten about in the refrigerator.
Drake raised questions about the definition of what classified a salad , a topic Ellie would’ve normally been eager to explore.
When his mom pulled the keyboard from the spare closet to regale them with Christmas carols after dinner, Drake asked her to dance.
Ellie refused to get up.
He grabbed her hand and made a cute plea for her to join him.
He was being kind, she knew, trying to include her.
On any other night, the gesture would’ve gone far.
But Ellie wasn’t in the mood. The photo album had tipped things over the edge.
During her loneliest years, Drake had lived a full life with Melinda.
There was nothing to worry about, he kept insisting, but their relationship had spanned at least two of his ten movies—and now, it took over his photo albums, too.
The youthful happiness that Drake had with Melinda made Ellie’s body physically ache.
Drake must have sensed her sadness; he pulled her into the hallway to ask if everything was all right as his dad rattled a tambourine and his mom sang “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him, moving back into the living room. What was there to say? Ellie wondered how to convey her feelings as the lyrics took on a menacing tone. Her mind spiraled away from her.
Drake was the one who suggested they stop going to the cinema.
How convenient, she thought.
Ellie needed to get him back there. He wasn’t telling her the whole story with Melinda—she felt certain of this—and she had to see how it all played out.
If they left the condo soon, there would still be time to lure Drake to the sixth screening.
There was one thing she needed to reinforce first, though: the rules.
Ellie had no desire to talk about what would play next.
The way she treated her parents. Her temporary affairs.
Maybe the part with the cowboy, even.
“I’m going to go warm up the car,” Ellie said when the threeact version of “Rudolph” reached its lackluster conclusion.
The suggestion was a cue for Drake to leave with her.
His parents took forever with goodbyes, and she had been ready to head out hours ago.
“Thanks for having us, Beth,” Ellie said, darting out the door.
When she turned around, he was still inside.
Her anger curdled as she moved toward the car.
It was only photos she’d seen. She was overreacting.
Why was she so obsessed with Melinda? Until recently, Ellie had been confident in herself, confident in them.
It wasn’t like she was afraid of Drake running off with Melinda.
She was with Jamie now. She wasn’t, in any tangible way, a threat.
But more than anything, Ellie wanted to know that Drake chose her.
Drake was it for her, the person who felt like family.
Yet Melinda had been so much more of a fit for him on paper that it was hard to get past. Drake’s parents must have loved her.
She spoke their language, ate their ham, and would probably even pull a tiny bell out of her purse to accompany the carols.
Also, unlike Ellie, Melinda didn’t wear a decade of grief on her sleeve.
There it was again, that easygoingness that had tormented Ellie the night of the dinner at Sal’s.
Life with Melinda was carefree, the photos reinforced.
Life with Ellie would never be easy.
Maybe she’d tried to play it off that way at first with Drake.
Maybe she’d tricked him into thinking this life, their marriage, would be straightforward.
But the cinema forced them to acknowledge the truth.
The scenes exposed her cracks, her flaws, her deep wounds.
She possessed a depth of pain that Drake would probably never have had to experience with Melinda.
Could Drake handle a life with more ups and downs, more challenges, more complications? Most of all, did he want to?
Ellie needed answers.