Chapter 5
Eve spends the whole of that first Thanksgiving dinner with Danny being mortified of her family.
Have they always been so stuffy, so pretentious, so boring?
Everyone jockeys to seem like they know the most about whatever political thing just happened even though everyone is getting their information from the same New York Times column.
Eve keeps shooting looks at Danny, trying to see if he thinks her family is as embarrassing as she does, but he just politely eats and thanks everyone for everything more times than is necessary.
“The potatoes are amazing, the salad is amazing, wow, these biscuits, thank you so much.” Eve wants to point out that no one present made any of it.
Besides, the best thing on the table is a jar of homemade huckleberry jam that Danny brought as a gift.
The crucible moment, in Eve’s eyes, happens when Phillip asks Danny how classes are going. Notably, Phillip has not yet asked Julian the same.
“Sir, frankly, I’d be in so much trouble if Julian weren’t in my history section,” Danny says. “I’m awful at history, but it’s a freshman requirement. I swear, Julian’s like a walking encyclopedia. What was that thing the TA told you about your essay?”
And then Julian takes the baton, and suddenly Phillip is nodding at Julian’s fresh new insights on Cold War disarmament policies.
Danny catches Eve watching him. He gives her this puzzled little smile—like he doesn’t realize he has done something special, or that his efforts would mean something to her.
Once everyone is done, Danny begins to clear the plates. Eve waits for her parents to stop him, and when they don’t, she’s mortified all over again. She leaps to her feet to help.
They end up at the sink together—her washing, him drying—while the voices of the others drift softly from the dining room.
Occasionally, their arms brush. Danny takes off his flannel and is wearing a slim white T-shirt beneath.
He has a terrible watch tan. On his neck, he has a thin silver chain he will later lose because Julian will tell him it makes him look like a fuckboy—but at the time, everyone has those thin chains, and the fact that Danny’s is settled in the hollow of his collarbone makes Eve feel like she might faint.
“The jam was really good,” Eve says. “Did your mom make it?”
“I don’t know my mom,” Danny says apologetically.
Eve wishes she could drain down the sink. Danny takes a wineglass from her—their fingers almost touch on the stem—and she is certain she has never met someone so polite, so sympathetic, so gracefully easy.
“It’s a funny story, though,” he says. “This woman from where I grew up actually mails me that jam. I figured out this guy was stealing from her, and now she thinks she has to repay a debt.”
“That is funny,” Eve says faintly.
“Not to freak you out or anything, but you’re looking at Bozeman’s former preeminent kid detective.”
Eve wants to laugh but can’t remember how.
She tries to imagine how the beautiful girls who tag Julian in photos would act.
They would flick soap suds and look up through their eyelashes.
They would know how to banter and how to flirt, and they probably had, Danny and the anonymous, confident legion.
“Hey,” Danny says, “was that you playing guitar? When we first came in.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“What was it?”
“I made it up.”
“Do you write a lot of songs?”
Eve eyes him warily. She’s averse to this line of questioning because she’s afraid of anyone realizing she takes herself seriously.
When she doesn’t hand him the next baking sheet to dry, he looks up at her and wipes the back of his wrist against his forehead.
It’s the first time she notices he has freckles. She loves them immensely.
“Yeah,” she says. “I want to go to school for music.”
“That’s awesome,” he says, and he seems to mean it. “In ten years, I’ll be going around telling everyone I knew you when.”
“Ha,” Eve says. “We’ll see.”
“In ten years,” he says, nodding firmly like they just made a promise.
In ten years, Danny will tell Eve that once, he solved a farmers market mystery and won the undying affection of a middle-aged jam peddler.
In ten years, Eve will act like this is the first time she’s hearing this story because the truth is unbearable: that she turns those fifteen minutes of dishes over and over in her head for the whole of December, worrying the edges until they become smooth and soft, hoping that when Julian comes back for Christmas, Danny will once again walk through the door behind him.
He doesn’t. Eve keeps waiting for Julian to say his name, but Julian speaks only of everything and everyone else, and finally, on New Year’s Day, when Eve can’t wait any longer, she asks if Danny is having a good holiday.
“He’s so whipped,” Julian says. “He can’t handle being away from his girlfriend for, like, two weeks.
” Eve goes to her room and cries about having been so young, and so naive, and so convinced that love had to go both ways.
She writes a tragic song and imagines sweet Danny Aagaard listening and being moved.
She imagines standing on the balcony in a robe and saying, “It’s too late, Danny,” or something equally cinematic.
She writes another song, a better one, about the moment she first saw him, the flannel and the honey locust tree out the window, but she hides the story in so many mixed metaphors and blurred stories that he will never really know it’s about him.
And then she moves on with her life. Mostly.
Except that she will never again let herself love someone with as much certainty as that month she loved Danny at age sixteen.
You can build walls in an instant. Taking them down again is the work of a lifetime.