Chapter 10
10
N ick
Truthfully, my house doesn’t smell that bad anymore. After Low walked back to her house and I went inside mine, I opened a window, cleaned up the mess made by the fire extinguisher, and noticed things slowly returning to somewhat normal. The scent still lingers in the way remnants of a campfire stay around long after the marshmallows are put away, but I can breathe easier. My eyes no longer sting like they did a half hour ago. If I stay out of the kitchen, I can almost pretend nothing happened. But Low doesn’t know that. And she’s not going to.
I’ll be a good guy and tell her tomorrow.
Today, I just want to be a guy looking forward to the prospect of spending the evening with a woman he finds interesting. The simple fact that I feel anything at all is a marvel I can’t quite process, but I’m trying. When something long dead sparks back to life, sometimes all you can do is hold your breath, hope the flame catches, and wait to see what happens next. This is me holding my breath.
Low answers on my third ring of the doorbell, taking her sweet time, almost like she doesn’t want me to be here. I’m a man without a home, totally displaced as far as she knows. What kind of person leaves someone homeless?
The kind with red hair, freckles on her nose, and bare toes painted gunmetal gray. My favorite.
“Come in.” Her greeting is the opposite of warm and delivered with an eye roll, but I don’t care. I’m here, and that’s step one. I’m still deciding on what step two might be. She sighs. “Your room is down the hall to the left. Feel free to go back there and hang out all night.”
It’s funny how annoyed this is making her. “As far away from yours as you can get, huh?”
“Exactly. And leave your shoes by the door like a good guest. Geez.”
I look down at our feet and slowly pull off one shoe and then the other. “Socks, too?”
“Gross, no.”
I laugh when she spins and starts padding toward the living room.
“George wants a shot of bourbon,” that dang parrot says, snapping me out of the trance I’ve fallen into as I watch her walk. I look at the bird.
“Why did I teach you to say that?” I mutter to him.
“Why did you teach him to say that?” she calls as she sinks into the sofa.
The bird hops around his cage without a care in the world, as I suppose one would from living inside a persistent state of happy hour. With a shake of my head, I walk down the hall to deposit my duffle bag on the guest bed—not a bad room, honestly. If I avoid the tiger-covered bedspread with its jungle theme and obvious nod toward seventies décor, I can almost pretend to like it. The duffle lands with a thunk, and I rub my hands together. Low might want me far down the hall tonight, but I’m sure as hell not staying here now. I wander back down the hall toward the living room. Now seems like a good time to bug my new roomie.
She’s disappeared like a phantom haunting the halls, so I go in search of her.
I find her a couple of minutes later sitting behind the desk in her office, fiddling with a cord attached to a big ring thing lit up so bright I have to squint to see her.
“What are you doing?”
She jumps at the sound of my voice and drops the tiny clip-on microphone in her hand.
“I’m practicing for tomorrow’s episode.”
“I didn’t know practicing was a thing.”
“It’s always a thing. Normally, I do it earlier in the day, but I got distracted saving my neighbor’s house. Also, I thought you were staying in your room.”
I take that as an invitation to sit in a corner chair. “You thought wrong, but your neighbor thanks you. Besides, all those tigers in that room are disturbing. Loretta has strange taste.”
“Hence, all the Amazon orders I’ve been unboxing lately.”
I smile. “Mind if I watch?”
Her eyebrows crease in a frown. “You want to watch me record? No one’s ever watched me record before.” The look on her face is one of abject horror, odd for someone who seems to enjoy the limelight. I mean, the chick has hundreds of thousands of followers. It’s almost like she’s self-conscious. For someone so prolific, that makes no sense.
“Unless you’d rather I not…” There’s no mistaking my confused tone at the end of that question.
She hesitates. “As long as you turn your chair around to where you’re not actually looking at me.” My gosh, she’s embarrassed.
“You’re kidding? Are you one of those people who pretend to be confident but aren’t in real life?”
Her eyes narrow into slits. “I am confident in real life. I would just rather be confident in private. I’m letting you spend the night here, so either turn your chair around or go watch television in the living room.”
I raise an eyebrow and spin my chair toward the wall, too invested in listening to her record than I’d like to admit. I’ve never heard anyone record a podcast before, never even listened to a podcast at all until my sister got me hooked on Low’s last week. Susan is more of a fan that she let on in my front yard, calling herself a “Lowdown” in the way teenage fans of Taylor Swift refer to themselves as “Swifties.” My sister is pushing forty. I was secondhand embarrassed for her. Or maybe it’s considered firsthand when you laugh in someone’s face. Lowdown? Come on.
“Okay, I’m turned around. You may proceed.”
“Thanks for the permission,” she says with a snort.
I can’t resist a muttered, “Permission granted,” then press my lips together and command myself to stay silent. A paperclip bounces off my head, lands on my shoulder, and slides down to my lap. I grin and pick it up, unwinding the metal to the sound of Low flipping a series of switches and saying “testing, testing” into a microphone. And then she starts speaking as though live and on air and not preparing for tomorrow. I never realized that’s how these things work.
“Welcome to the Lowdown with Low Reed…” she whisper-talks into a microphone. Ah, the moniker reveals itself. The change in her voice is so dramatic that I swallow what might have been a loud laugh. This woman is therapist-level calm, a masseuse’s soft fingertips working over an old football injury. Nothing like the temperamental lady yelling at a helpless bird a mere ten minutes ago. It’s drastic, to be sure. But my initial incredulity fades into quiet admiration as she keeps going. This woman knows what she’s doing. No wonder so many tune in to listen to her every day. There’s a quietness to her demeanor, a wisdom behind her perfunctory quips and stoic advice. There’s an electric current bouncing through the room, almost as if it’s attached to the sound of her voice. It’s the kind of electric current that makes you want to join the shock waves for a moment, just to ride the wave for as long as it lasts.
It's that current that has me opening my mouth during a commercial break to say a sentence I’ve never uttered in my life, not ever or likely ever again.
“Okay, fine, I’ll do your show.”
She clears her throat. I feel her stare on my back, and I want to reverse time. Stuff the words back in. Call myself an idiot and launch into a coughing fit that proclaims me sick in the head, sick in the throat, or sick in the gut. Whatever kind of sick it takes to get me out of this. There’s nothing like digging your own grave and watching yourself fall into it headfirst.
“You will?” she asks, awe-struck and high-pitched.
And then suddenly, I mean it. I spin my chair back around to face her.
“Sure. What can it hurt?”
Have there ever been more na?ve words uttered in the history of human language? That’s doubtful. But before I can second guess myself further, I’m being handed a script, one that Low clearly wrote before today. She planned this, the little schemer. But I find myself smiling for the first time in a while.
It’s nice to be thought about, especially when the woman doing the thinking is a tiny bit neurotic and a whole lot beautiful.
Let’s not forget crazy. The chick is crazy. Who cares if she’s a little bit right? I do because I’m here for the argument. We just wrapped up her episode notes, and I don’t like the direction she’s taking. Not the bullet points or even the potential list of questions callers might have for me—that part was fine. I’m just still having an issue with Low’s stance on being a “yes” person instead of a “no.” Saying no is not gentler, no matter how much she insists on the opposite.
“Telling people ‘no’ to everything is not the same as setting boundaries. That’s just being mean.”
“Not if you’re saying yes to things you don’t want to do. Then you’re just being mean to yourself.”
I lean my head back on Loretta’s living room sofa and look up at the ceiling. “You think we should all just go around doing things we want to do? You think yoga instructors want to work out every day? You think teachers want to put up with other people’s poorly behaved kids?” I’m on a roll and lift my head. “You think driver’s ed instructors want to ride in the car with teenagers who keep crashing into light poles? You think Jesus wanted to die on the?—”
“Okay,” she says firmly, stopping me with a hand up. And alright, maybe that was me taking it a little far. She rolls her eyes. “Don’t use Jesus to make your very bad point.”
“I thought it was a good point. I thought it was a great point, actually.” I take another long pull from the bottle of Michelob Low handed me a half-hour ago and stretch my legs on the table in front of us. “Just like Jesus, not all of us are happy about the choices we’re presented with. He begged God for a way out just like I—” I stop talking because there it is. I’ve tried hard to keep the bitterness I feel out of this conversation—out of my whole damn life—but it just seeped in through a crack in my otherwise hardened demeanor. My sister claims there’s nothing hard about me, but we both just heard the painful truth. In some areas, at least, I’ve grown cynical. I don’t like this version of myself, though I’m completely devoid of ideas to kill it effectively.
“What did you beg God for?” Low quietly asks, taking a sip of her Perrier, a large wedge of lime floating inside her glass like a glimmering emerald stone.
This is a road I can’t venture down. I haven’t talked about what happened in months; opening the floodgates now would only result in a broken dam and me swiftly drowning in my sorrow. My days are best kept together through grit and denial, busyness, and mental shutdowns.
My nights, though. My nights are when my insides scream.
For some unimaginable reason, my mouth starts moving.
“A way past the guilt,” I say, upending my drink again in hopes the liquid might numb me quickly now, before the pain starts. Now, before the crushing regret kicks in.
“Guilt about what?” she asks. And I don’t even care that this is therapist Low doing the talking. Right now, I don’t need a friend. Maybe I just need someone to listen. Maybe she’s just the passerby unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of my emotional word vomit, but here it comes, ready or not. There’s no time to grab a bucket.
“About not getting on the plane with Sherry even though she wanted me to go. About choosing to spend my wife’s last moments watching basketball with friends instead of sitting beside her while she was likely frightened out of her mind. About skipping my job for a chance to hang out with friends. I was crunching chips in front of a television screen while her prop plane landed in a heap of smashed metal and burning engines off the coast of Nantucket. How’s that for poetic justice? How could I not feel guilty for that? My ego isn’t big enough to absolve me of responsibility, and it never will be. All because I said no to her. And now you’re telling me that I should start saying no to everyone else? Well, forgive me if I just can’t do that.” I’m breathing heavily by the time my tirade is over, and I’m horrified. That’s more than I’ve admitted out loud to anyone, and I just information dumped all over a practical stranger. That makes me pathetic by anyone’s standards, even my own.
Low wordlessly pulls a blanket across her lap, and I’m suddenly aware of the chill in the air. I reach for one, too, and drag it up my chest, then keep talking.
“Sherry was a stager for high-end homes, and I was the handyman who made sure everything was in working order. We worked for the top real estate agency in the Northeast—Sotheby’s. Maybe you’ve heard of them?” Everyone’s heard of them, hence my sarcasm. When Low inhales softly and nods, I know she’s no exception. “We did every single job at the same time. Sherry staged a room, I helped move in heavy items, hang pictures, replace faucets—made sure all was in proper working order before the houses were listed, like clockwork. But that day…we didn’t work together. We had just gotten home from a trip to Trenton, New Jersey, and I was tired and didn’t feel up for leaving again so soon. Plus, my friends were having a basketball watch party. I just wanted a night off to hang out with the guys. Things don’t seem selfish until afterward when you realize just how selfish they were.”
“It’s not selfish to want some time off, Nick.”
“Maybe for some people, but we hadn’t been married long enough for that.” The weight of those words never gets easier to carry, no matter how many times I release them. If anything, they’re more unbearable as time marches on, especially when you cross the threshold of how long you were with a person versus how long you’ve been without them. When the latter supersedes the former, that’s when despair latches on and chants the mantra that you’re the selfish one for still living and breathing and waking up each day. You’ll do anything to drown it out.
Even taking on odd jobs in hopes that the buzzsaw in your hand will scream louder than the buzzing inside your head. The insurance settlement from Sherry’s death was so high that I could keep the odd job life up indefinitely and still have money to burn. And therein lies her parent’s problem with me, though no one has been bold enough to utter it. Allegations are especially fun when everyone dances around them.
“I remember you said a month,” she says. “And that sucks. But you didn’t want time off from your marriage, Nick. Just time off to watch a basketball game. Anyone else would have done the same without thinking twice about it.”
That might be right, but even knowing something doesn’t make the truth of it any easier to comprehend. Who’s only married a month when death is involved? Sure, there are stories about honeymoon tragedies and wedding venue catastrophes and second thoughts that lead to quickie divorces, but those instances happen to other people, a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not peculiarity that only occurs in the movies or at a New York City pay-to-view venue. A circus act. The fat lady singing. The fire-breathing trapeze artist that inadvertently burns the house down.
Our house burned down in twenty-nine days. A full day shy of a technical month, but who’s counting? I’m counting. My in-laws are certainly counting. And maybe now Low is counting. She’s being too quiet to know for sure, but the judgment in the room sits heavy on my shoulders. Though I’m positive I’m the only one putting it there. For the longest time, no one speaks.
“Do you want to keep talking about this?” she suddenly asks, sitting forward. It’s such an unexpected change in subject that I blink.
“Not really,” I say on an exhale, grateful to be given the option to quit.
Low stands. “Good. Let’s save the seriousness for recording tomorrow’s podcast. Tonight, let’s do something fun. Even though I hadn’t exactly planned on you being here…”
It’s a lighthearted statement, but my pulse has picked up speed at her words. “Low, I’m not sure I want to broach the subject of my wife when?—”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t bring up anything you don’t want to talk about.” And just like that, my worries about tomorrow’s show dissipate. For some reason, I believe her.
“Okay, then what do you want to do?” I’m cautious of her answer. I find Low incredibly attractive; I won’t deny the places my mind and body have gone over the past week since we met. I’m a guy, after all, one with perfectly good vision and an overactive sex drive. But I’d be disappointed if she suggested anything inappropriate after coming off a conversation about my wife.
I needn’t have worried. Low doesn’t suggest anything like it.
Not even close.
“What kind of a question is that?” I ask. “Of course, we need it. We wouldn’t be making one without it. Then it would just be a…house.”
Low stands on a stepstool in front of me, giving me a nice view of her backside as she peers into an upper cabinet and pulls out spice after spice after spice. Garlic powder, black pepper, onion salt, and cinnamon are laid out on the counter below her. Paprika falls out of the cabinet and lands upright with the lid open. Nothing spills; thank goodness for messes averted. Yeast packets slide off the shelf, followed by a plastic jar of vanilla and a bag of powdered sugar. A tiny white puff rises and settles onto the counter.
“Okay, messy Julia Child, get off the stool and let me look. The way you’re throwing things around is giving me anxiety.” I tap her thigh in a “move it” gesture, ignoring the way my fingers itch to spend more time exploring that area.
She reaches back to swat at my hand. “Julia Child wasn’t a baker, and I can find it myself.”
“Well, calling you the Pillsbury Dough Boy seemed insulting, and I’m sure you can, but I want to try so…” I swat her thigh again, and she swats my hand back. I kinda like this game.
Low makes an unflattering sound and twists at the waist to shoot me a look that has me grinning. “It’s just like a man to think he can do better.”
“And it’s just like a woman to think setting boundaries means never asking anyone to help ever. Get off the stool.” When she hesitates, when her cheeks warm a few shades of pink, I know I’ve hit a nerve. “Ah, that’s your hang-up, isn’t it?”
“I don’t have any hang-ups,” she says. She’s still standing on the stool.
“Except for letting anyone help. You think I help people too much, but you don’t want any help at all. How is that better?”
“It’s better because being independent is an asset.” Still, she jumps down and makes room for me to climb up.
“So is helping people.” Silence descends for a fraction of a second. And then…
“Do you see any up there?” she asks.
“So much for being independent. I’m not even on the stool yet, Betty. Have some patience.”
“Betty?”
“Crocker. Thought that one was obvious.” At her sigh, I start digging around the cabinet. This place is a mess. Nothing is alphabetized or organized by purpose—everyone knows you keep the salts away from the sweets, but there, the onion salt is hanging out by the almond extract. It’s chaos, I tell you. My mother would be horrified. And before you start laughing at my kitchen spice neuroses, organizing spices was one of my many jobs as a kid. My mother owns a cake shop downstate, so my summers involved me covered in flour, making regular grocery runs, and organizing supplies in alphabetical order by category. Flour separated from sugar, bottled oils separated from sprays, savories separated from sweets…you get the idea. It was tedious, but the lessons stuck.
I’m on the verge of ending my search when I spot a small bottle lying on its side on the top shelf, pushed all the way to the back.
“Found it,” I say, giving the bottle a shake and handing it to Low.
She lets out a squeal and takes it from me, turning it over to inspect it. “Thank goodness. It expired last year, though. You think that matters?” She removes the lid and sniffs.
Have more offensive words ever been spoken? “Yes, it matters?—”
But Low shrugs her shoulders and sets the bottle down. “It smells fine. Besides, it’s not like we’re going to eat it.”
I frown. “Of course, we’re going to eat it.”
“It’s a gingerbread house, Nick. No one eats gingerbread houses.”
Literally, everyone eats them. I say as much.
“Well, we’re not going to eat this one. We’re going to bake it, smell it, decorate it, and take pictures of it so everyone can see what a great job we did.”
“Ah, the true spirit of Christmas, going to elaborate lengths for an Instagram post. By the way, whose birthday are we celebrating?”
Low makes a face. “I’m perfectly aware it’s Jesus’ birthday, but we’ll debate your stupid point later. What are you doing up there?”
“Organizing your spices.” I’m on the letter J in the savory section and move the Jerk seasoning into line behind a jar of Herbs de Provence. Things are looking better already. “It’s a mess up here.”
“Are you judging my spice cabinet?”
“I’m judging it and your decision to keep all these sugars in open bags. You’ll get bugs storing them like this.”
“I’ll run straight to the Container Store tomorrow,” she says in a way that conveys it’s the last thing she’ll do. “Now, put my sugar away and move over so I can grab a mixing bowl.” This time, she presses her fingertips against my waist, and I’ve got to say I don’t hate it.
I hop off the stool and move it to the side, noting the spot where her fingers touched stays warm, like a phantom lover still pressing against my skin, even as Low moves around the room.
Expired spices notwithstanding, when the gingerbread dough is rolled out, cut into squares, and popped into the oven a half-hour later, I’ll admit Low was right. This house smells heavenly, like a North Pole cookie factory with Santa waiting in the wings to taste-test the final result.
And me. No matter what she says, I’m eating this thing. At least a bite of shutter or windowpane or a solitary roof tile. Eight-year-old me balks at the idea I wouldn’t. I’ll admit, I was a chubby kid. Thank God for puberty, the delay notwithstanding.
Low had a bag of gumdrops up in that cabinet of hers, along with tubes of icing in three colors that would horrify my homemade-advocate mother, a Ziplock filled with restaurant mints, and red and gold snowflake sprinkles. We dragged it all out and are in the process of making it work, though the gumdrops are hard as river rocks. I made the mistake of biting into one; the Pop Rocks lesson from third grade apparently didn’t stick. Blessedly, this time, my teeth did.
“So, I have a proposition for you,” I say. “In lieu of payment for appearing on your podcast tomorrow.”
“I don’t pay people to appear on my podcast, ever.”
I raise an eyebrow. “This seems like a bait-and-switch situation. If I’d known I wasn’t receiving compensation…”
“You would have done it anyway out of the goodness of your heart.”
“Who says I have a good heart?”
She breathes a laugh. “The twenty-seven hundred projects stacked in your garage, two revolving children running around your yard, and a blonde named Brandi pretty much gave it away.” She lowers a paintbrush she’s using for icing and looks me in the eye with a smirk. “But maybe I’m wrong.”
For a long, playful second, we’re locked in a stare-down…until my pulse taps against my neck, and I look away to compose myself. What is it about this woman that makes my insides short-circuit?
“I won,” she says, picking up the brush again and dipping into a tub of red. Red like heat. Red like embarrassment. Red like the blood current pounding inside my body from all sorts of inconvenient places.
“You won what?” I ask, working to compose myself. “I wasn’t playing anything.”
“We were totally locked in a no-blink competition, and I won.”
“ I wasn’t locked in one, so your win doesn’t count.” Honestly, I kind of was, so it kind of does.
“My wins always count,” she says. “Now, are you going to tell me your proposition or not?”
Oh. The proposition I’ve already forgotten about. “Yes. I was asked to be Santa Claus at my sister’s work next Saturday morning. She works at a library and—” The laugh that explodes out of her nearly knocks me backward. It isn’t that funny. Granted, I’m not exactly relishing the idea of looking jolly at this stage in my life—hot, sure. Intellectual, absolutely. Friendly and laid back, I’ll take those too. But Jolly and jiggly, not so much. It is the cross I will bear for the sake of a few happy kids. Namely, Rowan and Sam and whoever else happens to show up.
Low is still laughing. “Why does this not surprise me? I’m assuming you already said yes.”
“I did, but?—”
“Of course you did.”
“Sue me for wanting to make a couple of kids happy. Which is exactly where you come in.”
Her jaw falls open when reality dawns. “Oh no, leave me out of it. Whatever it is you’re wanting, the answer is not on your?—”
“I need a Mrs. Claus.”
“Then ask Brandi. I’m sure she’ll be happy to help.”
There’s a curious tone in her words, one I find intriguing as well as a little bit hot. Snarkiness is as unflattering as it is flattering, especially when the snark is hiding a deeper, more curious emotion. She’s jealous. I point it out.
“Jealous of what?”
They say the more dramatically a person reacts to a claim, the likelier they are to be experiencing the claim. In other words, Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much is a spot-on statement. That Shakespeare dude was wise beyond his years.
“Of Brandi being my hot wife.”
“Mrs. Claus is a lot of things—happy, merry, old , a great baker, extremely patient considering her husband leaves for long periods of time and eats a death-defying diet of cookies twenty-four seven—but she is not hot. What’s your point?”
“My point is, I don’t want Brandi to play my hot wife. I want you to.” That sentence came out all wrong and leaves me feeling uncomfortably guilty, but I’m in it, and I’m not backing down. I may have lost the staring contest, but I won’t lose this.
“As flattering as that sounds…”
“Do it for me, and I’ll be your date for the book thing.”
She stills. Her hands, her breath, her whole body except for her eyes. They look right at me. The tension is thicker than the three tubs of colorful frosting lined up in a row on the table between us. She sets the paintbrush down.
“How do you know about that?”
“I saw on the card in your office and put two and two together. Doubleday wants to offer you a contract, don’t they? But you need a date to make your ‘healthy relationships’ podcast more believable, and from the looks of things, you appear dateless. Feel free to stop me if I’m wrong.”
She slumps forward in her seat, the Christmas cheer from earlier all but absent from her demeanor.
“You’re not wrong.”
“You want to tell me what happened? I’m assuming there once was a ‘significant other,’ or he wouldn’t have been added to the invite, though maybe I’m assuming too much…”
“There was a significant other for almost two years. His name was Josh. I thought he loved me—and he did, I suppose—until my podcast got too big for his fragile ego to handle. He broke up with me a few weeks before I came here on a night I thought we were getting engaged. Said we were too different now, but the only thing different about me was my job.” She shrugs as if it doesn’t matter.
It matters. The look in her eyes, the weight on her shoulders, the sorrow across her back—all of it adds up to something that mattered a lot.
“So, he was just another guy threatened by a woman’s success?”
“Appears that way, though the phenomenon is much more widespread than you might think. I’ve lost a few girlfriends this past year as well, including my roommate who ran off with Josh the very next day. Turns out they’d been seeing each other in the side the second half of our relationship. In case you’ve lost count, that was an entire year.”
“They deserve all the misery they will undoubtedly fall into.”
“One can only hope.” She sighs. “It sure hurts to lose friends, though.”
That one makes my spine bristle because Sherry dealt with it as well. “Correction: You never lose real friends. Instead, you’ve lost one jerk, one back-stabber, and a few females masquerading as friends. Real friends aren’t threatened by success. They celebrate it. So, in my opinion, you didn’t lose much of anything. More like you avoided an even bigger heartbreak in the future.”
She eyes me through long lashes like she doesn’t quite believe my words.
“In what way?”
“In the way that you would have invested even more time in people who didn’t deserve it. The longer you live in a habit, the harder it is to break.”
“Wow,” she says. “Maybe I should use that line in my show.”
“Feel free to use it tomorrow. If you credit me as the mastermind behind the quote.”
One side of her mouth tilts upward, and it feels like she’s given me a megawatt smile. “Noted. Sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”
“Sherry dealt in multi-million-dollar properties. The first time she sold a four-million-dollar home, let’s just say her old friends didn’t exactly throw a party. Only one texted to congratulate her. No one called. Average people tend to want you to stay average, like them. Don’t rock the apple cart or something like that.”
“I’ve never understood that expression.”
“Me either. Not to mention, I think I got it wrong.”
“I’m pretty sure you did, but I’m not invested enough to Google it.”
“I think maybe I should be offended?”
“Not at all. It was a decent analogy, even if it was botched.” Low picks up a graham cracker and slathers one side with green icing. “This gingerbread house is sad.”
“The saddest. Except I did take a bite out of the front door, and it wasn’t half bad.” The front door was made from a Hershey bar turned sideways and coated in peanut butter. I haven’t eaten one of those in years.
Low shakes her head. “It’s like you’re a four-year-old boy.”
“No, I’m a man who remembers doing this very thing with his mother and likes to slide back into nostalgia once a year. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, you know?”
“Man, you really should market these inspirational quotes. I hear they’re a hit at craft stores.” She places the graham cracker on the roof and holds it in place for a few seconds. “Sorry about your mom.”
“No need to apologize. She was a good one, but at least I still have my sister. We usually do this together. Between this and the tree shopping, if she finds out I didn’t wait for her, I’m likely to get murdered.”
“My lips are sealed,” she says, and I can’t help but steal a glance when she presses them together, watching as they transform from full and pouty to thin, then back again.
You can tell a lot by a woman’s lips, but the only thing I’m deciphering now is how utterly soft they seem. Like something a man could sink into and get lost inside and?—
“But…okay.”
I blink, all at once, certain I’ve missed something.
“Okay, what?”
She clears her throat. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
I’m still at a loss; either that or my brain has temporarily been silenced by raging hormones. I’m not sure I reacted this way about being alone with a girl, even at fifteen years old. Even a few years ago, after I first met Sherry?—
I shut that thought down as fast as it appeared. Comparison is a thief of joy or something like that. I haven’t felt much joy lately, but I don’t want any of it stolen before it has the chance to materialize. Then, all at once, it hits me: she’s agreeing. She’s saying she’ll do it.
“You’ll be Mrs. Claus? For Christmas?”
“No, I’ll be Mrs. Claus next July. Yes, for Christmas. I just need you to fill me in on the details.”
So, I do. And then, because turnabout is fair play, she fills me in as well. Which I need, because though I offered to be her date for the book thing, I never actually knew what it entailed—who it involved, where it’s located, what might be required of me. And now I do. And here’s what I’ve discovered.
Of the two options, dressing up as Jolly Old Saint Nick is the less mortifying one.