Henry
“What do you think Mom and Dad even want for Christmas?” asks Cal.
I tell him I have no idea. “They’re at an age where they don’t want things,” I say.
We’re in Cal’s truck again. Kelsey’s in her car seat. We’re listening to a channel on Sirius XM called Kidz Bop where children sing pop songs. It’s like the soundtrack to a nightmare, but Kelsey is totally into it.
“I saw online that you can get people a snack-of-the-month subscription,” Cal says. “Like every month you’ll get gourmet pretzels or, like, dehydrated fruit or something. Maybe that?”
He veers around someone who’s making an unbelievably illegal left turn.
“I can’t tell if that’s a great idea or literally the worst idea,” I say.
“Same,” he says. “Society needs to normalize adults giving their parents cash for Christmas. Like, ‘Love you, Mom and Dad. Here’s a hundred-and-fifty bucks.’ ”
Cal called this morning and invited me to go Christmas shopping. In years past, we’d do this sort of thing online and Venmo each other, but he insisted that I need to go places like a functioning member of society might.
“Oh, by the way,” I say. “I forgot to mention this when we were mousetrap shopping. But I went by the row house the other night.”
Cal looks at me, then back at the road. “Whoa. Really? How was it? Did you go in?”
“No,” I say. “I just stood outside, then left. It was okay. Sad.”
He swats my thigh. “That’s not nothing, man. That’s progress. What made you go?”
I look out the window and tell him that I don’t know, but that’s not true.
I thought about Grace this morning while I was brushing my teeth, then again when I was walking around my neighborhood, because I think she’d get a kick out of the dancing Santa.
I think about Brynn all the time, like a TV that I can’t turn off.
The few times I’ve been with Grace, though—watching movies and running around Lake Roland Park—I’ve at least been able to turn the volume down.
She’s like a little vacation from being sad.
“Was your neighbor there?” Cal asks. “You know, the old guy?”
“Mr. Ross? Yeah.”
“He spies on me whenever I check on the place,” says Cal. “Bet he’s got bodies over there, like, buried under the floorboards.”
“His shovel victims,” I say, and Cal smiles at my Home Alone reference.
We pull into a sprawling new retail space that I only kind of knew was here.
Baltimore is an eclectic mix of historically significant hundred-year-old buildings and brand-new shopping plazas.
This place, a few miles from my apartment, is a classy version of the latter, with a Whole Foods, some restaurants, and a ton of boutique shops.
We park and get out of the truck, and I bear witness to the wrangling required to get Kelsey into her BabyBjorn.
“Moms like scented candles, right?” Cal asks.
“Sure,” I say. “Dads less so, though, I’m thinking.”
“Oh, hey, you know what?” he says. “There’s a shop that I worked on here. Let’s swing by so I can show you how cool it is.”
I tell him sure, whatever, and we veer left. Moving through the plaza, I mostly pay attention as he tells me about recessed lighting. “The wood floors are sweet, too,” he says. “Total pain in the A-S-S to source, but worth it. It’s just up here.”
“Great.”
“By the way, why are you limping?” he asks.
My nether regions mostly feel better, just a dull ache now. “I went running yesterday.”
“Running?” he says. “Really? Were you, like, being chased by a bear?”
We’re about to walk into a little shop called Precocious HQ when Cal catches me by the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m looking at you,” he says.
“Why are you doing that? I don’t like it.”
He assesses my outfit, my face, my hair. From his chest, Kelsey offers me her crab teether.
“Nah, thanks, I’m good,” I tell her.
“Some advice,” Cal says. “Maybe consider being more intentional with your facial hair. Right now, it just kinda looks like you forgot to shave.”
“What?” I touch my face. “You didn’t shave, either.”
“Yeah, but I meant not to. Also, you do this thing sometimes where you avoid eye contact. Maybe stop that. Kinda comes off as weird.”
“Dude?”
He opens the shop door. “I love you, by the way. Okay, just be yourself—but maybe a little better.”
Before the warmth of the cozy little place even fully washes over me, I realize what’s happening.
A woman looks up from behind the register and pushes her hair out of her face.
She sees my brother, then she sees me. She’s tall, she has glasses, and I’m surrounded by children’s books.
Crap. It’s the client Cal told me about at Thanksgiving, and if my niece weren’t strapped to his chest, I’d punch him in the back of his head.
“Meredith G.!” says Cal. “How’s business, lady?”
Her name is Meredith Greer, and she tells me that Precocious HQ is her dream store.
“I know how earnest that sounds,” she says, “but, well, it is.”
She has an impressive cascade of long, dark hair that she keeps having to tuck behind her ears, and her glasses are striking—silver-rimmed and quite large. They frame her face well, but something about them also indicates hyperfunctionality, like she really, really needs them.
In addition to kids’ books, the shop sells a mishmash of other things. Art supplies, games, puzzles, a few racks of T-shirts with fun graphics. There are displays devoted to banned books, Maryland-themed stuffed animals, and famous feminists.
“I wish this had been here when I was a kid,” I say, and she smiles. “Oh, and kudos on the decorations.”
“Yeah? You like it?”
“Honestly, I don’t know if I could like it more.”
Somehow Meredith has managed to re-create a shop-size version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, that old stop-motion TV special from the ’60s that Grace and I talked about.
Along with pretend snow on the floors and individual flakes hung from the ceiling, she’s set up life-size replicas of the characters, and it’s all just fabulous.
“When I met with your brother the first time, I had the whole place laid out,” she says. “I’d drawn all these pictures on graph paper. He helped me bring them to life.”
When we first got here, she asked Cal about installing floating shelves behind the register. Now she’s giving me a tour while Cal and Kelsey play with raven and oriole stuffed animals.
“You’re not from Baltimore, right?” I ask.
“Is it that obvious?”
“I’m a lifer,” I say. “We can tell.”
“D.C.,” Meredith says. “No way I could afford this down there. Plus, I was ready for a change.”
There’s a wound there. This ham-fisted attempt at matchmaking wouldn’t be happening if there wasn’t, I suppose. When you’re our age and you find yourself being set up with strangers, it’s because whatever plans you had for your life have been tossed out the window.
Our tour has brought us to replicas of Rudolph and Bumble the Abominable Snow Monster. They’re standing together—Rudolph smiling, Bumble waving. “Oh wow,” I say. “Turns out they were friends all along.”
Meredith’s laugh is disarming and includes a snort.
“So, Cal told me you’re an artist?” she says.
I look over at my brother, my hype man, and imagine him telling Meredith about me—doing his best to make me sound like someone who isn’t a mess.
“Very subtle, Cal,” I say.
We’re walking now, Cal and me and a dangling Kelsey, along a bustling sidewalk.
“Um, whatever do you mean?”
“Mhm.”
“I was right, though, wasn’t I?” he asks.
“About the recessed lighting? Yeah, it was okay.”
He laughs. “About Meredith being awesomely nerdy.”
“She’s not a nerd, Cal,” I say. “She just has glasses and looks like she’s read a book since junior high.”
“Whatever, dweeb,” he says.
A man on the other side of the plaza walks a large dog on a leash, and Kelsey points and scream-laughs.
“I know, right?” says Cal. “Doggie.”
Two women wearing big sweaters glance at my handsome brother and his adorable child. As always, Cal plays this off with practiced obliviousness, like only someone who’s been good-looking his whole life can do.
“She liked you, you know,” he says. “I could tell.”
“Stop it.”
“You stop it.”
We should hit that men’s store over there for a dad gift, brainstorm ideas for our mom, maybe get something to eat. But for now, we’re walking with no particular purpose.
“I really do love you, you know,” he says.
“I know, Cal,” I say.
“And I don’t want you to move to L.A.,” he says. “I want you to stay here forever.”
When I don’t say anything, he stops walking.
“And I want you to be happy,” he says. “I think that you think you can’t be—or that you shouldn’t be—because Brynn is gone.
But you can, and you should. That’s why I wanted you to meet Meredith.
I don’t know, man, maybe you’ll never lay eyes on her again.
But she’s nice, and she’s cool. And there are other nice, cool people out there in the world.
And you deserve to be with one of them. Preferably one here, in Baltimore. ”
Cal and I have spent so much energy in our lives joking around. Healthy or not, it makes times like these—times when we don’t say something silly or quote a movie—feel that much more significant. Just two guys and a baby sharing a moment while causing a minor pedestrian traffic jam.
“Plus,” he says, “L.A. is stupid.”
“Yeah?” I say.
“The Pacific time zone makes zero sense. The whole state is about to break off into the ocean, and with your sickly complexion you’ll burst into flames in a day and a half, tops.”
“Gosh, I never thought of any of that,” I say.
Kelsey points at another dog. She seems to be wondering why we’ve stopped walking.
“Hey,” Cal says, “you wanna wear her for a little bit?”
“Who, Kelsey?”
“No, that lady over there. Yeah, Kelsey.”
“Um,” I say.
“Here, she’s all yours.”
My brother is a BabyBjorn pro at this point, so transferring her to me just takes a second. I’ve held her before, but never like this, and I’m surprised how light she is, like half a bag of groceries. She points at Cal and says, “Dah.”
We didn’t want kids, Brynn and me. The country was moving backward.
The world was overcrowded and burning. Plus, every couple we knew who had kids became broke, tired shells of their former selves.
So, we committed to childlessness and each other.
We did carefree things. We took day trips to wineries and went to concerts.
We had sex in the afternoons and stayed up too late watching holiday movies together.
Cal and I are on the move again, off to find presents for our parents.
Kelsey’s weight pulls me gently forward.
We didn’t want kids, but as my niece’s fine hairs tickle against my chin, I wonder if losing Brynn would’ve been slightly less awful if there was a small person here with her eyes and cheekbones.
“Just watch out for her little heels, though,” Cal says. “She’s tall enough now to kick you right in the balls.”