CHAPTER ELEVEN
Alex
Then
The house smelled like apple cider and pine. Ornaments crowded the tree’s branches. A manger scene sat on the mantel, small and precise, the kind of care I recognized because I’d never lived anywhere that gave itself to it.
Christmas morning had come.
Riley and I had spent the night at his parents’ place, me in Addy’s old room, him in his. Panzolini tradition put us all in new pajamas on Christmas Eve. The five of us were wearing them, sitting around the tree.
I sipped cinnamon cider from a ceramic mug and sat cross-legged beside Della’s chair. I watched Addy and Riley sort the gifts into piles, unable to stop smiling.
Della leaned down and touched my arm. “How’s the cider, dear?”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Like everything else.” I nodded at the tree. “I’ve never had a real one before. It’s incredible.”
“Oh.” She looked faintly appalled. “Do your parents put up a plastic tree?”
Martina and I used to assemble one from the attic every December. It was plastic, with a rotating color wheel at the base that threw red and green light up the silver branches. My grandmother’s tree, supposedly. A tradition, of sorts.
Della’s tree was real. It stood two feet taller than Riley.
“Plastic,” I said. “Yes.”
“I’m so glad you’re here.” She wrung her hands. “It’s wonderful, having everyone together.”
I’d felt like part of the family since Thanksgiving. Hearing her say it out loud made the feeling seem less like something I’d invented.
“I can’t imagine being anywhere else,” I said.
“It’s a shame your parents couldn’t make it back. Sad, really.” She squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll get to see them soon, I hope.”
The story was that my parents were stuck in Spain.
A passport problem, a canceled flight. There was always something.
I’d stopped being surprised by many years before.
I wasn’t about to explain that to Della, though.
I’d learned, since starting college, that my parents didn’t care about holidays, or family, or, as far as I could tell, me.
I was getting better at not building weather around their absences.
Better. Not good.
“Heads up,” Riley said, and lobbed a small package into my lap.
I set it with the others gathering at my feet. A small mountain of them, wrapped in bows nearly as big as the boxes they sat on.
“They can’t make it home,” I told Della. “I’m happy here, though. Really.”
“I know the holidays are hard, away from family.” She patted my knee. “I hope this is an acceptable substitute.”
It wasn’t a substitute. It was more than I’d had in years.
“Everyone here is my family,” I said. “This isn’t a substitute. It’s a new chapter.”
She leaned over the arm of her chair and hugged me. “It’s a new chapter for me too. One I’ve waited years for. I’ve never seen Arturo—Riley—this happy.”
“I’ve never been this happy,” I said. “Ever.”
“One day you’ll understand,” she said, glancing at Riley, her eyes bright. “Nothing is more satisfying than seeing your children happy. Especially after so many years of the opposite.”
I couldn’t picture having a child of my own without also picturing myself failing at it the way my parents had failed at it. The fear sat somewhere behind my ribs, low and constant. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted, first, to be sure I wouldn’t ruin someone the way I’d been ruined.
“Okay,” Riley said, rubbing his hands together. “That’s everything.”
Six large gifts and a scattering of smaller ones sat at my feet. A stocking nearby had tipped over and spilled its contents onto the carpet.
“What now?” I asked, trying to sound like a person for whom this was routine.
“We open them, silly,” Della said.
“Can we go one at a time? I want to watch everyone else open theirs.”
“That’ll take all day,” Addy said.
“It’s easy,” Della said. “I open mine blind and watch everyone else.”
We tried it her way. I lasted about a gift and a half before I gave up entirely and just watched.
Ten minutes later the floor was ankle-deep in torn paper. Riley had saved my gifts for last.
He opened the boots first. His whole face changed. He held them up like they weighed something. “I need these in my life.”
He pulled them on over his socks and stood. “Perfect fit.”
“I got your size off your old ones. Same maker, so you’d actually like them.”
He walked the length of the hallway and back, breaking them in. While he was gone, his mother leaned toward me. “He’s had those other boots since he was seventeen. He never spends money on anything. I’ve never met anyone so tight with a dollar.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “The truck. The bike.”
“He got that motorcycle for a song,” she said. “In cardboard boxes. He and his father put it together in the garage over a summer. Antonio begged him to paint it while it was still in pieces. Riley wouldn’t spend the money.”
Riley came back in his new boots and picked up the second gift. I held my breath while he peeled the paper away.
“I think I know what this is,” he said. “Maybe.”
It was flat. Two feet by four, a couple of inches thick. Under the paper was a plain cardboard box.
“A picture?” his mother whispered.
I nodded and didn’t trust myself to say more.
He lifted the framed piece out of the box. It faced Della and me first.
“Oh my.” She put a hand to her chest. “It’s beautiful.”
He turned it around, looked at it, and then at me. His eyes went bright. “How did you—”
“I found a woman in New York who does custom drawings. I had someone take pictures from across the road, like they were watching us from a distance without us knowing. Then I sent her a picture of me from that angle, and one of you. She did the rest.”
It was a black-and-white ink drawing of the rock where we’d had our first kiss, seen the way a stranger might have seen it from behind.
Two silhouettes, his hand disappearing into the back of my jeans, my foot lifted slightly off the rock.
The horizon behind us was done in watercolor, orange and pink bleeding into purple.
In the corner, beside the artist’s signature: First kiss.
Riley looked at it for a long moment. “I don’t even know what to say. It’s—”
“Beautiful,” his mother finished. “That’s the two of you, isn’t it?”
He turned it so everyone could see. “It’s the first time we kissed.”
Della wiped her eyes and hugged me. “The two of you. This is too much.” She fanned her face. “Tony, did you see this?”
Antonio nodded, fighting a smile of his own. “It’s beautiful.”
Riley leaned the frame against the wall and looked at me. “Alex.”
“What?”
He nodded toward the hallway. “Come with me.”
I followed him to his old room, expecting a kiss and not much else. He did kiss me. That wasn’t why he’d brought me back there.
He handed me a box roughly the size of a grapefruit.
“Open it.”
It weighed almost nothing. I shook it and heard nothing shift inside. I wondered if it was a letter. A poem, maybe.
“Why wasn’t this out with the others?”
“I wanted you to open it away from everyone.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Wasn’t sure how you’d take it.”
I peeled the paper away. Inside was another box, wrapped in tape from end to end. I gave him a look.
“Cute,” I said. “Really cute.”
It took a while to get through the tape. Inside that box was another, and inside that one, another, until the last one gave up a small velvet box, the kind a ring comes in. I told myself he wasn’t about to give me a ring. I had no idea what else it could be.
I opened it slowly.
A diamond ring sat inside. A round center stone, with smaller stones circling it.
“But—”
“It’s not an engagement ring,” he said. “It’s a promise ring.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew him well enough to know what it had cost him to walk into a jewelry store at all.
“My promise is this,” he said. “I love you.” He tipped my chin up and kissed me. “Let’s see where that takes us, okay?”
Whatever version of myself I liked to present dissolved completely. Capable, unbothered, a girl who didn’t need anything from anyone. I was just a girl who wanted, more than anything, to be loved.
Those were the words I’d been waiting for without letting myself admit it.
“I love you, too,” I said, and meant it more than I’d ever meant anything.