Chapter Twenty-Seven
Max
Becca arrives again on the twenty-third with a suitcase full of Christmas and two weeks of opinions she’s been storing up since she last left the penthouse.
She lands at Logan at noon and Gio picks her up—which she calls suspicious and luxurious in the same breath, two adjectives I’ve decided are essentially her review of our entire situation—and she walks into the penthouse with garland in one hand and a cup carrier with two iced coffees in the other after she forced Gio to make a stop for us on the way back. She freezes.
“Max,” she shrieks.
“I know.”
“Max!” She gasps again. “He decorated?”
I roll my eyes towards the living room where two twelve-foot trees decorated with pretty glass ornaments sit, glittering and proud.
Garland covers the mantel of the electric fireplace and there are presents under one of the trees.
“And he bought presents!” She wheezes and twirls with the garland swinging around her like she’s in a Christmas movie.
“And some of them are for you,” I laugh out and make my way down the hallway to drop her suitcase in the guest room.
“For who?” She screeches.
I walk up behind her where she stands staring at the presents and trees.
“For you,” I whisper, waiting for more shrieks.
Cal showed up with his arms full a week ago, overflowing with colorful bags and boxes all beautifully wrapped in golden ribbon and glossy red paper.
When I asked who they were for, he said he had to get on Becca’s good side.
I scoffed at him and looked at a tag that said Max in his handwriting.
When I asked about it, he said he didn’t know anyone with that name, and I proceeded to chase him through the penthouse.
The chase somehow ended with us in the shower and his hands all over me.
Which was, arguably, better than any present he could have bought at any store.
“Does he have a brother? Wait. He does have a brother! I remember this about him!”
“No, for all intents and purposes, he does not.” I roll my eyes and take the garland out of her hands, laying it on the island in the kitchen. “But he felt like he needed to make Christmas special for us.”
“Special? For us?” She cackles. “He is in love with you and I get to benefit by association and I’ve never been happier for myself—I mean, for you, obviously,” she continues laughing and drops her purse next to the lonely garland.
Her rainbow hair is curly, and her smile is dazzling as usual.
“I was so happy to take time off work I almost forgot to buy you something myself.”
“You didn’t need to get me a single thing because you being here is the best present.”
I hear Bart padding up the stairs down the hall and he saunters in, tail wagging for pets from Becca.
“I will not be shown up by any man,” she says in baby talk to Bart. “Will I, Bart? No, sir, I will not!”
“So, the new job has been fine?”
“No, it sucks.” She stands up and claps her hands. “But I’m surviving!”
I sigh, wishing I could fix it.
“Maybe you can get a real estate license and sell my house.”
“Does that mean you’re staying here forever?” She raises her eyebrows at me and smiles.
I take a big breath. There’s nowhere else I want to be. I know this thing with Cal is new. But it’s the old kind of new. The kind of new that feels worn in and fits just right.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think I want to be back in Abbott.”
“That’s fair. Who does, really?” She turns around and puts her hands on her hips, eyeing the penthouse slowly. “And, honestly, Max, I wouldn’t want to leave either. Look around.”
Those words are truer than she realizes.
The 5th Street café is, predictably, Becca’s new favorite place in the city within walking distance.
She sits across from me in the chair that has become Cal’s chair—he’s not here this morning, he had a meeting, which means Gio is at the table behind us and Becca keeps waving at him.
He keeps maintaining professional neutrality, which she finds hilarious.
She is convinced that she will get him to break while she’s here for the next week.
Becca wraps her hands around the mocha she ordered and looks at me over the top of it with the focused attention of a woman conducting a wellness check.
“You look different,” she notes slowly.
“I had a good night’s sleep.”
“Not what I mean.” She tilts her head. “You look like yourself. More like yourself than you have in a really long time.”
I look down at my own coffee, hiding a smile.
“I think I forgot what that felt like for a while.”
“I know.” She says it simply. “I watched it for two years and I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like I was criticizing you.
You were disappearing. Even…” She pauses, then continues with a sigh, “even with Bart and the house and Carla and all the stuff you built, you were getting smaller and smaller and I didn’t know how to—”
She stops. Her throat bobs.
“Anyway. You’re back. That’s all I wanted to say.”
I reach across the table and squeeze her hand.
“I’m back,” I agree.
She squeezes back hard and then releases. “And not because of a man, okay? Because—”
I cut her off with my hand. “No, because I feel like I’m finally back on track with chasing the dream I started and didn’t get to finish.
And I feel like I can do it. But also yes.
” I smile at her and glance back at Gio.
“The man part doesn’t hurt. Cal has a lot to do with it.
Because I don’t think I’ve ever felt that…
feeling of someone just being all in to support me. ”
“Ew.” She makes a face. “Then what am I?”
I roll my eyes at her exaggeratedly and lean back. “Not a man who is all in to support me,” I repeat.
“Fair. Now tell me about law school. You said the transcripts got approved?”
“Faster than they should have.” I give her a look and our conversation from last week telepathically works its way between us on the table.
“The donation.”
“He says he made a contribution to the library fund,” I emphasize the word.
“The library fund,” she repeats knowingly, with mock seriousness.
“That’s what he said.”
Becca presses her lips together, waves a hand as if dismissing the implication. “Right. Yes. Of course. The library fund. How utterly philanthropic of him.” She takes a sip of her mocha. “And your classes?”
I tell her about the courses I am set to start in a few weeks.
I already received the syllabi; I did some sleuthing on the professors.
And I recount to her the sensation of walking back onto a college campus after years away and realizing that the dream is still there, still mine, still something I can hold.
We discuss the internship that fell into place through one of Cal’s contacts at a criminal defense firm in town.
She jokes that Cal will probably text me every morning when I leave for school. She says he might actually listen to me drone on and on in legalese and might actually pay attention; says she’s happy for that because she won’t have to pretend to understand for me anymore.
I tell her about Cal’s joke that Gio should also be enrolled since he will have to sit in all my courses with me. I tell her about how Cal spoiled me with a fancy bag to carry all my files and schoolbooks.
I gush with excitement and for the first time in forever, it feels like I can. Like I’m allowed to be excited.
Becca listens to all of this without interrupting, which takes visible effort.
“He makes my coffee right,” I blurt, which is not the thing I meant to say.
She looks at me like I grew a second head.
“I know that sounds small,” I backtrack. “But Patrick never once—”
“Oh, I know.” She makes a mocking face at his name.
“And Cal pushed me toward law school. He put the pamphlets there before he said anything about it. He was just—” I stop, my face heating as I pause on the memory of finding the pamphlets while straddling him on my desk.
“He was waiting for me to find them myself. He wasn’t going to push; he was just making sure the door was open. ”
Becca is quiet for a moment.
“So… He’s smart,” she whispers. “Funny. Kind, when he thinks no one’s watching.” She ticks these off on her fingers, watching my face. “He makes your coffee right. He got you a reading chair. He waited forty-five years to basically—what? Give you the world?”
“He didn’t wait, exactly. He had a whole—”
“He waited,” she says firmly. “The other stuff was just time passing. He waited, Max, he bought the penthouse by the river and waited.”
I look out the window at the city. It’s cold outside, snowy; it’s bright and the street is full of people moving through their own lives and for once I don’t feel like I’m watching everyone else’s life from a window I can’t open.
“Yeah,” I agree. “He waited.”
And the realization is striking. Because I hadn’t considered it that way. He had a million other things going on. But he did wait. He waited to find me. And now that we are here in this together, it feels like we are both on the same page—and that page is refusing to let go of each other again.
Sunday dinner is Becca’s Christmas gift to herself, she announces, which means she has decided she is coming and nobody was allowed to veto her decision.
“All I want is a traditional mafia dinner one time—” She puts her hand up before Cal can respond or correct her. “Or whatever, Sunday dinner, or whatever you call it.”
Cal looks at me after she says it. I look at him.
“The more the merrier,” he responds without hesitation, which makes something warm bloom in my chest because I know it’s true and I know he means it when it comes to Becca.
The Renzetti house at Christmas is a force.
Carmela has been baking cookies for three days preparing for Christmas tomorrow, but Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday, so dinner at her house tonight it is.
There is a tree in the corner of the living room that is either professionally decorated—or Sophia was very serious about aesthetics—and there are candles everywhere. The smell of the house is garlic and pine and something baking that I can’t identify.