Three.
After a completely out-of-the-way layover at JFK, during which I seriously contemplate buying a ticket to the Bahamas instead, I land late in the afternoon on December thirteenth.
My parents are waiting at Midway. My mom is bent at the waist, checking the tags and scowling at the bags as they round the carousel.
She looks up as I come to the end of the escalator.
“You should tie a ribbon around your bag handle,” she says before I even get out a hello.
She watches as a leggy woman in winter-white cashmere pants and dramatic eye makeup finds her matching suitcase, bedecked with a red plaid ribbon at the handle.
She looks like someone traveling because she wants to, not because she has to prove to her family that she has no fear of bumping into the guy who broke her heart.
“Merry Christmas,” the model-adjacent prepared traveler says but only addressing Mom, who’s smiling at her like she wishes she could take this woman home instead of her daughter. I can’t blame her.
“Thank you, dear,” she says. “Same to you.” Meanwhile, I’m aware that my two black suitcases really do look like all the other ones going by unless you note that they are lumpier because I hastily packed just before my flight.
I grab my smaller one, but the bigger one—containing all the gifts—still hasn’t shown.
I’m almost excited about this, as it will give me a reason to escape my parents’ house and go to the mall for replacement presents.
But then a misshapen black suitcase lands with a thud on the opposite end of the baggage carousel.
It’s definitely mine, because I shoved a Baby Alive doll for my niece, Alice, inside, and I can hear it crying.
People are staring at my wailing suitcase, and I wish I’d checked the doll for an off switch, because a few travelers are regarding me with curled upper lips, baring teeth like I packed an actual baby.
I give Mom a thumbs-up as I heave my bag off the belt, as if to say, Who needs a ribbon when you’ve packed with the haste of someone fleeing a crime scene?
The trip is off to a great start, my ability to take care of both myself and a fake baby already called into silent-but-still-judging question.
The doll quiets down as I stack my smaller case on top of the larger one and pull them toward Mom. She gives me the quickest of hugs—lingering hugs are something my family only does when tears are involved.
“Jilly,” she says fondly. But then she holds me at arm’s length and surveys my travel-ravaged outfit—no cashmere leggings for me, just Gap jeans with so much stretch that they’re now bagging around my knees. “I thought you’d be tan. Living by the beach and all.”
“It’s winter in LA, too,” I say defensively, even though in summer I’m no more likely to see the beach.
“Dad’s circling outside. It’s a fortune to park here,” she says. “We’ll have to wave him down.”
We make our way outside—it’s fucking cold, and the wind hits my body like a battering ram. My nipples immediately freeze under my turtleneck before a colder gust of air whips past me and causes my entire breasts to harden, like they’ve been coated in icy shellac.
The airport is predictably a madhouse, with cars parked like janky teeth along the curb and people rushing to heave luggage into trunks so they can get out of the cold.
Someone in the line waiting for a spot lays on their horn, and my head jerks toward whoever would be so impatient when now is clearly a time for patience.
“Oh, it’s Dad,” my mom says, waving wildly to him, not at all embarrassed that the loud honking has made the entire batch of waiting arrivals glare at our car in disdain.
It is my dad, stopped in his SUV alongside a Mini parked at the curb. He’s preventing at least four cars behind him from moving but shows no sign of shame. Instead, he rolls down one window and yells, “Hurry! You can jump in so I don’t have to circle again.”
“Let’s move,” Mom says, as she agilely grabs the smaller of my suitcases and nimbly weaves around a double stroller in her rush toward the car.
I wheel my lumpy suitcase through gray slush, keeping my head down like a celebrity trying to duck into a restaurant so that the other drivers can’t link me to my parents.
Mom thwarts this as she cranes her neck back and says, “Jill, do you need help?”
So much help , I think.
Dad pops the trunk, and we throw the suitcases in the back. The big one lands hard enough that Baby Alive issues another muffled cry.
“Here—early present,” Dad says, tossing a Ziploc bag to me as soon as I sink into the backseat. He drops a second one in my mom’s lap. Inside each one is a pair of white athletic socks.
“What?”
“Guy by the expressway entrance on Cicero was selling them. I stopped on one of my circle-rounds,” he says. “Nothing like new socks.”
“New expressway socks,” I correct him, shaking out the contents of the bag. The socks are soft, though, and the pair inside my knockoff Uggs feels thin and a little wet.
“Thanks, honey,” Mom says, tucking the bag into her purse. “But you don’t have to buy them every time you see a guy.”
“Two bucks. It’s a good value,” he says.
“Is it, though?” I offer from the backseat.
“They’re meaningful,” he says. The story with the socks is that years ago, when they were first dating, my dad took my mom to a work event downtown.
Mom was in heels and stockings and stepped in a puddle on one of those October days where the water was close to frozen.
Noticing she was cold and miserable, my dad left the event, jogged three blocks, and bought socks from a guy at an expressway entrance.
He told her that he never wanted her to have cold feet around him.
And ever since, he buys her more of the socks anytime he sees them.
“Just humor your father,” Mom says, leaning back and winking at me.
We take one of Dad’s shortcuts, avoiding some of the worst preholiday traffic, and it’s not long before we’re rolling toward our house, the wet slosh of the street squishing under our tires.
There’s a five-minute window for a white Christmas in Chicago’s south suburbs—you get to witness it right after the snow finishes falling; otherwise, it’s all salted roads and gray piles of plowed snow at the curb.
You never see that in a Heartfelt movie, where everyone lives in a place with a whimsical name and snow as unmarred as the skin of the lead actress.
Whimsical doesn’t exist in Powell Park and its surrounding environs. The horizon repeats itself: grocery store, auto-supply store, drive-thru fast-food place, cell phone store, Target, Applebee’s. Oceans of cars fill the parking lots in front of the businesses.
“So, we’ll get you unpacked and then decide how we can make the most of your visit,” Mom says.
I look out the window at the nearly dead mall at the edge of Powell Park.
It was a nice shopping center when I was a kid until two anchor stores closed when I was a teenager.
The spot that was once Traister’s Department Store, where my mom used to take me to get new winter coats, is now a bargain electronics warehouse.
“Oh, I have a batch of sugar-cookie dough in the fridge for you to roll out with the kids. Or we can do a gingerbread house,” Mom says.
“If you’re not too tired.” She’s fizzing with excitement, and I feel like it’s not solely because I’m here.
The holidays always turn her up a notch, and even though she sometimes packs so much into the season it stresses her out, she also seems to gather energy from doing every Christmas activity possible.
Meanwhile, just hearing Mom lay out options for conjuring Christmas magic makes me tired. And, maybe, a disappointment to her.
But then, I feel fairly disappointing all the time.
You know how some people claim their parents’ divorce or contentious relationship has soured them on love?
Well, it’s my parents’ loving relationship that makes me certain I can never come close to what they have.
My parents met working at an advertising agency—my mom was a designer, and my dad worked in accounting.
In old pictures from when they first got together in the ’80s, they look interesting and fashionable, even if my mom had a penchant for jackets with shoulder pads and my dad wore a beret unironically (his attempt to show the creatives that he had an artistic side).
After they had kids, my mom left the agency and—besides a few freelance jobs here and there—she never really went back to design.
She stepped out of her cool, creative career and had seemingly no regrets.
Instead, she seemed to get more content as time went on.
She draws and designs all my niece’s and nephew’s birthday invitations, just like she did for my brother and me.
She reads voraciously and volunteers at a soup kitchen.
And she still has her eclectic sense of style.
Today she’s wearing her usual gold-framed glasses, her neat silver hair in a cool shoulder-length cut with bangs that actually work.
And she’s wearing cuffed jeans with shiny red patent boots and a dark-purple Henley that doesn’t seem like it should work but does.
It’s as if she didn’t lose any part of herself when she opted to leave her career; instead, she became more fully herself.
Through all of it, she’s also remained nonjudgmental toward other women: the ones who juggle work and kids or the ones who don’t have them at all—it doesn’t matter.
You’d think her resistance to opining on other women’s choices would make her insufferable, but it doesn’t.
It also doesn’t convince me that she’s not judging me, that she doesn’t think I’ve fallen short of the life she’d like for me.
“Cookies sound good,” I say, even though I’m starting to feel the full effects of my cheapo flight.
Dad makes a left turn, and we’re officially in my hometown now, the border marked by a stone Welcome to Powell Park sign that has several chunks taken out of it from drivers underestimating the width of the median.
It feels oddly symbolic: the whole place seems to have a chunk taken out of it.
The gray sky competes with the gray facades of strip malls and urgent cares and bank buildings with empty parking lots.
The Keating Street Diner, where I used to drink coffee and scribble early screenplay ideas in notebooks, is now a Denny’s, and not a particularly well-manicured one.
We go over some railroad tracks and turn onto Ninety-Fifth Street, the main drag, which is mostly charmless—it’s tried to be charming, but it’s six lanes wide, so Powell Park’s attempts to make it a cute, walkable street never quite take.
There are a few bright spots, though. My favorite red-boothed Italian restaurant, Giovanni’s, is still around, two doors down from its casual counterpart, the Powell Park mainstay, Amano’s Deli.
But where before the eateries were bordered by a dress shop and a hair salon, now those storefronts are empty.
As we get closer to the library and city hall, the buildings are older and have more character, but only a little bit more.
On one side of the street, there’s an old Victorian house that now holds a kids’ art-and-activity center and a small grocery store, Freshline Foods, while on the other, next to the library, is the Powell Park Green (which is in no way green), replete with lights strung around its tall pine tree.
At the base of the tree is a six-foot-high Santa sleigh that was magical to me as a kid but now bears a giant sign reading Brought to You by Danielson Ford across its front.
Past the green, you can make out a playground and, past that, a line of older brick homes where my friend Allie Rivera lives.
When we were best friends in childhood, we’d go to the playground in the middle of the night and rock on the swings while talking about everything.
We’re not so close anymore. Allie got married and had the babies she dreamt of, and I stood up in her wedding and went to her baby showers, but it got harder and harder to stay close, especially after I moved.
She was raising kids, and I was writing screenplays, and our attempts at conversation just illuminated how little we still had in common.
By the time Allie and her husband decided to divorce last year, we were rarely in touch.
I tried to check in and see how she was holding up but only got a short reply—which made sense because we’d barely spoken the year before her split was official.
I’m sure she figured I was digging for information.
My mom did tell me that Allie moved into her parents’ old house, the one I knew so well—they moved to Florida—and her ex kept the home they’d bought a few suburbs away.
I sink down in my seat. If my parents notice, they pretend not to. I almost forgot how many people I’d have to avoid in Powell Park, my very own ghosts of Christmas past.
It’s going to be a long visit.