Thanks and Giving #2
“Luca, I hate to say anything, but I think my cat has a drug problem.”
“Hey—you brought him home half-baked and drooling. Remember that? It’s not our fault he’s been searching for the ultimate high ever since.”
Isaac’s laugh was low and sweet. “Luca,” he said, when he was done chuckling.
“Yeah?” Luca came closer, squatting next to the chair so he could be near Isaac, take in this moment under the chill November sun.
“It’s okay if you’re a little mad. Don’t be mad at yourself. You offered to help when all I saw was a big list of stuff only I could do. That’s huge. Suddenly Thanksgiving’s fun again. We gotta come up with some stuff your sister can do or she’s going to feel left out.”
“Make the centerpiece,” Luca said. “Even if she’s buying one from the craft store.” He paused. “You have no idea—none—what this means to her. Decorating for Halloween. For Thanksgiving. For Christmas—you are decorating for Christmas, right?”
Isaac grimaced. “We have really boring ornaments,” he said. “Plain silver balls, red bows, white lights. I’m tempted to tell her they all fell down and got smashed in the garage so she can go to town at craft fairs and on Etsy.”
Luca chuckled. “Maybe like the house. Move out the old stuff a little at a time. When did you want to get the tree?”
“The week after Thanksgiving,” Isaac said. “But I wanted to hit a sale at a nearby hardware store for some multicolored lights. At the very least we can have those.”
Luca’s heart, which had been shivering and a little cold since he’d run out of the kitchen, grew warm again. He pushed up and took Isaac’s mouth, pulling back to rest their foreheads together.
“Isaac, you should always have color in your life. Let me know if I ever let you down in that department, okay?”
Isaac let out a little sigh and a hum. “You are color in my life,” he said softly.
Then Euclid meowed loudly again, and Isaac shivered in spite of the blanket, and they took their show back inside.
LUCA DIDN’T mind getting sucked into the entire holiday.
He and Isaac had fun in the grocery store, bouncing ideas off each other, changing plans at the last minute.
They went from a pumpkin pie to a pumpkin cheesecake with a few keyboard strokes on their phones, and bought accordingly.
Luca sorely overestimated how many sweet potatoes they would need, and Isaac told him dryly they needed to buy an extra box of cornflakes and five extra pounds of butter to make that happen.
So Luca did, because the way Isaac described sweet potato casserole, that was the only reasonable answer.
And both of them were quite surprised when they ended up with a whole extra turkey because of grocery store points.
“But what are we going to do with it?” Isaac asked as they pushed the incredibly overloaded cart to the car.
“Cook it the next day, then freeze everything and have turkey casserole and turkey sandwiches and turkey hash for the next three weeks!” Luca said, incredibly excited about all of that.
“Can you imagine? For three weeks, we don’t have to answer the question, ‘What’s for dinner? ’ It’s always going to be turkey!”
Isaac whimpered. “How about we stop by the soup kitchen on the way home and drop off the extra there?” he said. “And maybe a couple pounds of sweet potatoes too.”
Luca sighed. “Killjoy.”
Which made Isaac laugh, loudly and roundly, as they loaded the back of the car up—before he looked up directions to the nearest donation place that would be super excited for a whole turkey.
The night before Thanksgiving, during which Luca had spent half the day cleaning with Allegra and half the day cooking with Isaac, Allegra sat at the table and tried to put together a silk flower bouquet in autumn colors—dark orange, brown, purple, mauve, and gold.
Luca was busy peeling and cubing potatoes—both sweet and otherwise—and he barely noticed his sister’s even breathing as she stood, stretched out her back, and then leaned over the table, bracing her weight on her arms, and tried to do the same thing.
Isaac was the one who looked up from pressing garlic into the stuffing broth and said, “Allegra, that’s the third time you’ve done that in the last hour. Is there something we should know?”
Allegra stared back at them blankly, and like a freight train, Luca was hit with what she’d been told at her last doctor’s appointment.
She was close—her due date was in three weeks. But that didn’t mean the baby wouldn’t come at any time.
Labor can be anything from the classic breaking of waters to breathlessness after leaning over doing a task. Watch out for small signs. A tightness in the back, lower abdomen cramping, even a violent mood swing or moodiness—all of it could mean labor is coming.
Like a one-two punch, it hit him that Allegra had been quiet, turned inward and thoughtful all day. She hadn’t had any commentary to offer after Luca’s Todd blowup four days before. Not that Luca expected his sister to weigh in on his love life, but, well, that had never stopped her before.
She swallowed. “No?” she said. “No,” she said, a little more firmly.
“No. Isaac, I refuse. You and Luca promised, right? You were going to come with me to the hospital. I—” She took a deep breath and said, “I should maybe just find another position while I finish up with this. It’s stressing my back out, is all. ”
Luca met Isaac’s eyes, and Isaac shook his head.
Fifteen minutes later, Allegra had stood up from her spot and was doing the same stretching routine.
Fifteen minutes after that, she was done with her project—and stretching again.
Fifteen minutes after that, she’d set the table completely, with napkins and coffee cups and a table runner and the centerpiece.
And this time, when she stretched, her breathing caught a little more tightly.
They started keeping silent track of when her restlessness would start and when she’d subside into her chair—even after she declared herself tired and done and had moved into the living room to knit and watch It’s a Wonderful Life on TV.
“Fourteen minutes,” Luca murmured softly to Isaac. “It’s happening every fourteen minutes.”
Isaac glanced over at her, pausing while grating cheese for the potatoes. Luca knew what he’d see. She’d fallen asleep, her knitting on top of her stomach, a line drawn over her brows even as she breathed softly in rest.
“Are they waking her up?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Luca murmured. “But she doesn’t realize that’s what’s doing it.” The last time, he’d watched her grunt, wake up, and yoga stretch some more from her chair, her breath quickening as what she probably thought of as a back cramp caught up with her, before she fell back asleep.
“Okay, then.” Isaac pursed his lips. “We’ve got a lot of it done,” he said.
“We’ve got the turkey prepped and ready to go into the oven tomorrow morning.
We’ve got the stuffing and sweet potatoes ready to pop in while the turkey’s resting, and the mashed potatoes ready to boil and beat while the turkey’s in.
We’ve got everything prepped, Luca—we just need people to do the right things at the right times tomorrow!
Including go to get Sophia and Geordie.”
Luca grunted. “Let’s text everybody tonight and tell them it may happen—maybe we can come up with a plan.”
Isaac nodded. “I mean, Jimmy Bob and Trixie met your grandparents at Allegra’s birthday party. How awkward would it be, throwing them together for a day and saying, ‘Hey, cook this when we say so’?”
Luca chuckled. “Either way, you finish up what you’re doing, and I’ll go upstairs and start calling.” He pointed to the pad of paper where he’d been keeping track of Allegra’s contractions. “She’s due for one in about seven minutes. If it’s significantly shorter than that, let me know.”
“She doesn’t even have a name picked out,” Isaac said softly. “We don’t even know the gender yet.”
Luca grinned at him, trying to mask his own anxiety. “Sure you don’t want to go back to the days of beige and perfect planning?”
“That was cruel and unwarranted.” Isaac sniffed. “I was only panicking like a perfectly normal uncle-in-law.”
And the fact that he was playing—playing—with the idea was enough to lighten Luca’s heart. They had two major projects going in the next twenty-four hours. The one thing they didn’t have to worry about was each other.
Luca went upstairs to make the requisite calls, but as he sank down onto the bed, Euclid hopped up (oolf—their kitten was now about ten pounds!) and started kneading his thigh.
Rubbing the purring monster orange boi gave him a moment to pause, to think, and he placed his first call to Roxy.
While Isaac had kept trying to explain the plan to him, he was still hazy on this “How to cook five thousand dishes at the same time” idea.
Like any student, he didn’t want to bother the teacher when they were in the middle of a thing.
Also, Roxy had become Allegra’s big sister, and while Allegra had asked for Isaac and Luca to be there when she had the baby, he had the feeling Roxy’s voice, at any stage she could make it, would be helpful.
“Oh!” Roxy said, and the sound of her voice told him she was in the middle of something too. “So now? So I’m elbows-deep in sausage stuffing, and Brian’s up to his eyeballs in pie, and your sister’s going into labor now?”
“They’re still about fourteen minutes apart,” he said. “I don’t think she even knows it yet.”
Roxy huffed out a breath. “Okay. So, yeah. You guys are doing good not to panic—and good to plan ahead. Brian’s mom’s thing is at three.
Let me putter along here and get my shit done, maybe cop a few hours of sleep.
Call me around eight to let me know how she’s doing.
Unless, of course, the whole thing blows up and you’re heading to the hospital at two in the morning—also a possibility, but it happens less often than you think, okay? ”