17. Chapter 17 Liam
We came out of the bedroom dressed and pretending that none of that had just happened. My mom was in the kitchen with coffee made and bacon going, because her answer to every holiday morning was bacon.
The kitchen was warm and bright and smelled of grease and the pine cleaner she'd used on the counter last night after everyone left.
The window above the sink was fogged from the stove.
The table still had the tablecloth on from dinner, a coffee ring near Linda's spot, the salt and pepper shakers pushed to the middle.
"Merry Christmas," she said, not turning around. She was at the stove in her robe and slippers, spatula in hand, her hair pulled up.
"Merry Christmas, Mom," I said.
"Merry Christmas," Alex said from behind me in the doorway.
We sat. She brought coffee. Sugar and milk for Alex, which she remembered from yesterday without asking. Black for me, which she'd been making since I was fourteen and started drinking it. She set the mugs down and sat across from us with her own cup, and looked at us over the rim.
"You two look rested," she said.
I did not make eye contact with Alex.
"Very rested," Alex said, and my mom looked at the ceiling for a second and then drank her coffee.
After having coffee and talking about last night, my mom stood up and said, "Let's do presents."
We made our way into the living room. Small and warm. The tree was still leaning left by the window, lights on, and underneath it around the base were the gifts.
Alex and I sat on the floor with our backs against the couch. My mom settled into the tattered armchair across from the tree, her coffee on the side table, her legs curled underneath her. The morning light came through the front window and hit the tree at an angle that made the ornaments glow.
Not many gifts. My mom and I didn't do Christmas big.
There was a practical limit to what two people on her salary and my marina cash could put under a tree, and we'd both stopped pretending about it years ago.
But what was there was wrapped. Some of it was wrapped well and some of it was wrapped by me, which meant taped in four places and crooked.
"You first," I said to my mom.
I handed her the box. She took it in her lap and pulled the ribbon off and peeled the paper carefully, the way she opened everything, saving the paper, folding it beside her on the armrest.
Inside: a pair of lined gloves. Real ones, insulated, waterproof. Thirty-two dollars, which was more than I'd spent on anything that wasn't food in months. But I knew she was still using those old, torn cotton gloves she'd bought when I was in high school. Her knuckles cracked every winter.
She opened the box and stopped.
"Liam."
"They're waterproof," I said. "And lined. So your hands don't freeze walking to the car at five in the morning."
She held them in her lap. Ran her thumb over the lining. She didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then she put them on and held her hands up and turned them back and forth.
"How do I look?" she said.
"You look like a mom with warm hands."
She took them off and put them back in the box carefully and got up, and kissed the top of my head. Her hand stayed on my shoulder for a second. Then she went to refill her coffee and said nothing else about it.
My turn. A few things under the tree with my name on them. A new hoodie, navy, from the outlet store. A paperback she'd seen at the pharmacy and thought I'd like. A bag of the beef jerky I'd been eating since middle school. Small stuff. Right stuff.
"Thanks, Mom."
"The jerky was on sale," she said from the kitchen. "Don't read into it."
"I'm reading into it."
"Stop."
Then the stocking for Alex.
It was hanging from the knob of the closet door because we didn't have a mantle. It wasn't a stocking, really. It was a red Christmas sock from the dollar store, the kind that comes in a pack. And written on it in black Sharpie, in my mother's handwriting:
ALEX
"That's yours," my mom said from the kitchen doorway. She was leaning against the frame with her coffee, watching.
Alex got up. Walked over to it. Took it down. Held it in his hands like he wasn't sure it was real.
Inside: a toothbrush. A bag of peanut M&Ms. A pair of wool socks, the thick kind. A ChapStick. Small things she'd probably picked up at the pharmacy yesterday morning before we were up.
He pulled each one out and set it on the couch. The toothbrush. The M&Ms. The socks. The ChapStick. He looked at all of it laid out on the cushion, and his jaw was tight, and he said, "Thank you" in a voice that was rough at the edges.
"Everybody gets a stocking," my mom said. She said it like it was nothing. Like it was policy.
Alex sat back down on the couch with the stocking stuff spread beside him. He was looking at the M&Ms, turning the bag over in his hands, and I was watching him, and then I wasn't. My eyes had drifted up. Past Alex, past the couch, to the tree.
The heron. Near the top, just below the star, catching the light from the window.
I looked at it. I looked at Alex holding a bag of M&Ms from a dollar-store stocking with his name in Sharpie. And something turned over in my head, quiet, like a lock finding its key.
"Mom, can we have the gas-station pie?" I said.
Alex looked up. "What's that?"
"Gas-station pie," my mom said, already moving toward the kitchen.
She pulled the fridge open and took out the dish she'd made last night after everyone left.
"The recipe came off the back of a box I bought at a gas station outside of Utica in 2011.
I was driving back from my sister's and I stopped for coffee.
And there was a box of pudding mix with a recipe on it and I thought that's either going to be disgusting or perfect. "
"It's perfect," I said.
"It's perfect," she confirmed, setting it on the counter. "I've made it every Christmas since."
"I'll help," I said, and followed her into the kitchen.
Alex stayed in the living room with his stocking.
My mom was cutting the pie. I pulled plates from the cabinet, the same mismatched ones from last night, and set them on the counter beside her.
"Mom," I whispered.
"Mm." She was focused on getting the slices even.
"The heron on the tree."
She stopped cutting. Looked at me.
"I want to give it to him."
She set the knife down and looked at the tree through the kitchen doorway. The small glass bird near the top, hanging from a thin gold hook near the star. She'd hung it there every year since my dad left. It was the one thing of his she'd kept.
"Alex's mom has a heron on the lake," I said, keeping my voice low. "She named it Frederick when Alex was a kid. It's a whole thing. And it will be meaningful."
"Then give him the bird," she said. She said it simply, like it was obvious.
"Not now," I said.
She looked at me. Waited.
"I don't want to just pull it off the tree and hand it to him."
My mom leaned against the counter. Her arms crossed. She was reading me the way she read everything, patient, letting me get to it.
"Okay," she said. "You'll know when."
"Yeah."
"But Liam."
"Yeah?"
"Don't wait too long. That boy needs to know people are giving things to him instead of taking them away." She picked up the knife and went back to the pie. "Bring the plates."