Chapter 28 #3
“He put extra glitter,” Justin confirmed, very seriously, a diplomat vouching for a colleague.
Anne bowed her head so Finn could loop it over her hair, and he did, with enormous care, and then stepped back to assess his work and nodded once, satisfied, and Anne stood up wearing a macaroni necklace over a very nice Christmas Eve sweater like it was the crown jewels — which, for the rest of the night, and I checked, she did not take off.
Anne’s mother, Carol, was already teary-eyed, one hand pressed to her chest, watching her daughter get crowned in painted macaroni by a small boy in a dragon costume.
I found Jess in the noise a little later.
She’d worked her way to the edge of the room, near the window, watching Anne be Anne in a house full of people who loved her, and when I came up beside her she leaned into me without looking, fitting herself under my arm like she’d been doing it for years.
“You’ve got a look,” she said.
“Do I.”
“You’ve had it all night. What do you know that I don’t?”
“Nothing.” I pressed a kiss into her hair. “Just a good night.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, and then — being Jess — let it go. She’s the only person alive who knows when to stop pulling a thread.
She tucked herself back against my side, and the two of us stood there and looked out at the room.
Justin and Finn were negotiating for what they clearly felt was their rightful reward for existing, which appeared to be more cookies. Barbara was refereeing.
It was something, seeing the three of them together — Catherine and Barbara and Carol, the grandmothers, one from each corner of this patched-together family.
Jess’s mother and Carol had folded Barbara into their group inside of five minutes, the way women do with anybody who turns up carrying a dish she made from scratch.
I drifted close enough to catch the tail of it.
Carol was telling Barbara about the year Anne was small and there was no money for a tree, so they’d cut branches and wired them to a broom handle, and Barbara was nodding along like she’d been there, and then Barbara said something low that made Carol put a hand on her arm and go still for a second.
“That’s my Justin’s boy,” I heard Barbara say, nodding across the room at him. “Or — well. Not mine. But you know how it is. You meet a kid and he’s just yours.”
“I know exactly how it is,” Carol said, watching Finn and Justin conspire over the cookie plate, and the two of them stood there a moment in the quiet understanding of women who’d loved children who hadn’t started out as theirs.
Herb — who’d spent four days deciding whether to approve of me and had, grudgingly, arrived at yes — was deep in it with two of the veteran guys about a hockey team that hadn’t existed since 1994.
And Mark stood off to the side taking it all in — the full house, the grandmothers, the kids, me in the middle of it instead of off alone at the edge the way he’d watched me stand for seventeen years. He was pretending it wasn’t getting to him. He was failing.
I looked down at the top of Jess’s head.
Six weeks ago I’d stood in her kitchen and set fire to all of this on purpose. Every person in this house. Every ordinary thing in it.
And thankfully, I hadn’t lost a single piece of it.
Snow coming down steady outside the window.
Her son across the room, high on his own importance.
My foster parents in the kitchen. A teammate three feet away, sitting on a secret that was going to change his whole life the second the house emptied out.
And the quiet came down over me.
The good kind. The kind Sloane said I’d feel eventually, if I kept doing the reps — not the alarm, not the cold flat exit-hunting stillness, but the other one. The one where your whole chest goes still because it is exactly where it wants to be and for once is not looking for the door.
I did not have a ring in my coat pocket.
I want to be honest about that. I wasn’t ready — Sloane would’ve told me to slow down, that six weeks reconciled is not a foundation, that a man learning to hold something should practice holding it before he tries to make it permanent. And she’d have been right.
But standing there, with Jess tucked under my arm and Liam across the room sitting on the biggest secret of his life, I let myself want it. All the way. No wall, no glass, no bracing.
I let myself picture it — a ring, a knee, this woman, that kid — and instead of the old panic, the reflexive certainty that wanting something was the same as setting it up to be taken, I just felt the want sit there in my chest, warm and enormous and mine to keep.
Soon, I thought. Not tonight. Tonight’s Liam’s. But soon. And I’m not going to run from it.
Jess tilted her head up and caught me looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” I kissed the top of her head. “Merry Christmas.”
She smiled, and looked back out at the party, and did not know — could not have known — that I had just, for the first time in my life, made a plan to stay forever and felt nothing but glad about it.
We left before midnight, the three of us, Justin asleep on my shoulder before we reached the car.
Christmas morning, Justin gave Jess the duck about nine seconds after she came downstairs.
He had not been able to sleep on it. He’d wrapped it himself, which meant it was mostly tape, and he stood in front of her vibrating while she worked her way in, and when she finally got the paper off and was holding a small painted ceramic mallard with one wing feather at a slightly wrong angle, he said, at a volume unsuited to the hour:
“It’s GERALD.”
Jess looked at it. Then she looked at me over the top of his head, and her eyes had gone bright, and I shrugged like I’d had nothing to do with it, which was true. He’d picked it. I’d just paid.
She hung it on the tree at the front, at his height, where he could see it.
Then Justin got to the box from the Ewings, the one Barbara had sent home with us from the party marked DO NOT OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS in her careful block letters.
Inside was a sweater she’d knit him herself — deep Blaze blue, and across the front, in careful stitched detail, a hockey stick and a puck.
He put it on over his pajamas immediately and refused to take it off for the rest of the day. He wore it to breakfast. He wore it in the snow. There is a photo somewhere of him asleep that night still wearing it, and I have looked at that photo more times than I will admit to.
“He’s going to want to wear that to school every single day,” Jess said, watching him model it for the tree.
“Barbara will knit him five more before New Year’s,” I said. “She’s been waiting her whole life for a kid who’d love it that much.”
Then I gave Jess mine, which was an envelope, which is a terrible-looking Christmas present and I knew it.
“It’s not jewelry,” I warned her.
“I don’t want jewelry.”
“You say that now.”
She opened it. Inside was a single page from the Blaze front office, the players’ emergency and personal information form, filled out and signed, with the top line no longer blank.
Emergency contact: Jessica Calloway. Relationship: —
I’d gone back and forth on that last part for two days and finally written mine.
She didn’t say anything for a second. Then she put her hand flat over her mouth.
“You put me on a form,” she said, from behind it.
“I put you on the form.”
“Carter.”
“I know.”
She came across that kitchen and got both arms around my neck, and I held onto her with a first-grader hollering about ducks somewhere behind us, and neither of us said anything for a while, because there wasn’t anything either of us needed to say.
Jess’s phone rang while Justin was still fitting Gerald onto his branch. She looked at the screen, and her eyebrows went up, and she said, “It’s Anne,” and put it on speaker and set it on the counter between us.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS,” Anne shouted, in a voice about two octaves higher than her normal one, and then, before either of us could answer, she just blurted it: “He asked me.”
Jess’s hand went straight to her mouth.
“He asked me, Jess, last night, after everyone left —”
“I asked her,” Liam said, somewhere behind Anne, rough, and it was strange to hear Liam — this big granite load-bearing man — sound like that. “She said yes.”
“Course she did,” I said, and had to lean back against the counter, because my throat had closed up and my eyes were doing something in front of a room full of people and I found I did not care.
“I had the whole thing planned,” Liam went on, “and I got about four words in and completely lost it, and she was already crying, and she said yes before I even finished —”
“Then I made him finish anyway,” Anne said.
“Then she made me finish anyway.”
Jess was laughing and wiping her face at the same time.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “Every detail, do not skip a single thing,” and Anne launched in, and I stood there with my hand flat on the counter next to a phone with the two of them pouring out of it, and let myself be glad.
All the way glad. No wall in it anywhere.
At some point Liam’s voice cut under Anne’s, just for me. “You two were the first call. Well — after her mom.” A pause. “I wanted you to hear it from us.”
And that got me, standing in a kitchen that wasn’t quite mine yet, in a life I’d very nearly thrown away — being on the first call, when a year ago I’d made good and sure I was never on anybody’s list for anything.
“Okay, I need to see this ring immediately,” Jess said, leaning toward the phone on the counter. “Bring it when you come. And Anne — do not downplay it. I can already hear you getting ready to downplay it.”
“I am NOT —” Anne started, and Justin, alarmed by the sheer volume of adults, came around the corner to investigate.
Outside, the snow had come down over St. Louis all night. Inside, everyone I had was under one roof, or a phone call away, or asleep down the hall.
My hands were full.
I did not want to put a single thing down.