12. Lori
Lori
We do not talk about the truck bay.
Not the dance, not his arms around me, not the way he pulled pins from my hair.
Not the resting hand on the seat between us on the drive home with the town sliding past. In the week that follows, he goes to work.
I go to work. We come home to the same kitchen, the same coffee pot, the same six-year-old who has appointed herself project manager of a Christmas tree she can barely reach the top of.
Instead of talking, we orbit around each other.
His hand finds my elbow when I pass him in the hall, and mine reaches for the coffee pot before his mug is empty. At dinner, his eyes catch mine over Cadie's head and hold, longer than in the past. Neither of us blinks first.
The town goes full Christmas mode — wreaths on every lamppost, white lights running the diner window, red ribbon on all the bells.
Carson's house smells like pine because Tina drops a wreath on the porch and a cedar swag for the mantel.
She was back in her truck before anyone can form the word “thank”.
Cadie has strong opinions about the ornaments and the placement of every nativity-set sheep — fourteen of them, all named, the one with the chipped ear is Gerald.
She has a letter to Santa that she writes at the kitchen table one afternoon, in shaky first-grade printing, tongue caught between the gap in her teeth.
"Lori, how do you spell forever?"
"F-O-R-E-V-E-R."
She writes it down with intense focus.
I set the apple slices on the table and glance at the paper.
Dear Santa, I want:
1. a baby brother.
2. Lori to stay FOREVR.
It’s missing an E, and the capital Rs are backwards. But what catches my attention the most is that the whole list is two items, and I am one of them.
Carson walks in from the porch. His eyes go to the paper, then to my face, then to his daughter.
"Kid." Clears his throat. Like his whole chest is not sitting in the base of it. "Santa doesn't deliver babies. Pick something else for number one."
Cadie does not look up. "Why?"
"Because that's not how Santa works."
"So how are babies made?"
"Cadie. Eat your apple."
I excuse myself from the room.
From the hallway, I hear her, earnest and undefeated. "Then who DOES deliver babies?"
And Carson answers, "Sweetheart. Apple."
I run the cold tap in the bathroom. I try to remember the last Christmas I do not spend alone or pulling a double at the diner.
My last Christmas is with Jason's wife's pumpkin pie in a to-go container, in the dark of my apartment.
Before that, it is Ryan's couch, the credit-card fight, him storming out the door.
Before that, it is Ella's place in Fredericksburg. The last time she picks up the phone.
From down the hall, Cadie laughs at something he says. Bright and full, the laugh of a kid who has never once questioned if she is loved.
I grip the sink. The wanting of this — the kitchen, the kid, the man, the holiday — does not fit anywhere inside me. The last time I want something this much, it packs a bag while I am at work and leaves me with nothing.
I dry my hands and head back. Cadie shows me the revised list:
1. a pony.
2. Lori to stay FOREVR.
The capital Rs are still backwards.
I tell her it's perfect.
The days blur into a quiet, charged rhythm, and before I know it, the calendar turns to Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve, we drive to Tina's. The house glows warm yellow from inside, windows fogged at the corners.
Her tree fills the front room, hung with ornaments older than Carson — a wooden cowboy with a broken nose, a faded star, a glass icicle that catches lamplight and throws it across the ceiling.
Kenny G plays softly on the radio. Junie is in my arms in a Santa hat two sizes too big that keeps sliding over her eyes.
Cadie is in her velvet dress and the rainbow boots, bouncing between rooms. The kitchen smells like roast beef, dumplings, garlic and the yeast rolls Hank has been told to keep an eye on.
Tina conducts everyone from the stove. "Lori, sweetheart, the gravy boat — top cupboard, behind the pickling jars. Hank, the rolls. Cadie, do NOT touch the cookies."
Cadie, deadpan, one finger in the cookie tin, "I wasn't going to."
Tina, not looking up, "You were."
"… Okay maybe I was. I’m hungry!"
“No sweets till after real food.” Grandma is the law.
Carson is at the counter, sleeves rolled, slicing. I pass behind him with the gravy boat in one hand and Junie in a baby sling, and his hand finds my hip for half a second. Gone as fast as it came.
The table showcases Tina's good china, lit candles, and cloth napkins Cadie has folded into unrecognizable shapes. She says grace fast and run-together, excited for her cookies.
"Dear God, thank you for the food and Daddy and Lori and Junie and Grandma and Hank and the rainbow boots. AMEN." She opens one eye.
“Amen!” the table replies in a murmur.
Halfway through dinner, Tina says to me, "Honey, you're three pounds underweight by my eye. Eat. Hank makes the rolls and the recipe is mine, which means they're the best ones you'll ever have."
"Take the second roll, Miss Lori. It saves arguments," Hank says.
I take the second roll. It is warm and buttery and the best thing I have eaten in a year.
After dinner, Cadie negotiates to open one present from under the tree — only one, just one, pleaaase, just one — and tears the chosen package to reveal fuzzy reindeer slippers from Tina. She pulls them on at once.
"I'm wearing them at home! I'm wearing them to bed! I'm wearing them in the bathtub!"
"Not in the bathtub, Kid," Carson says from somewhere in the house.
"We'll see!"
As the night continues, Carson reads 'Twas the Night Before Christmas on the couch with Cadie curled into his side, his voice down at its lowest register. I watch from the kitchen doorway.
"He makes me read that to him three times a night," Tina says beside me. I had no idea she was there. "Cannot sleep until I do."
When we leave, Tina pulls me into a hug at the door — the full kind, both arms, the cedar smell of her good coat closet. "Merry Christmas, dear."
I do not know what to do with my arms. She feels me freeze, rubs my back once, and lets me go before I can say anything back.
Christmas morning comes at 6 a.m. in the form of a reindeer-slippered blur crashing through Carson's bedroom door.
"Daddy! DADDY! It's CHRISTMAS!"
I hear it from the guest room, Junie stirring in the bassinet beside me. I press my face into the pillow and listen to the stampede down the hall and think this is what Christmas sounds like in a house with a happy kid.
The presents under the tree are wrapped with enthusiasm and without skill — taped in wrong places, crooked seams, one gift in a grocery bag with a bow stuck on.
Cadie tears through hers in pajamas and the reindeer slippers: watercolor paints, a horse book she keeps showing to Junie, sparkly clips she pins to her pajama collar for later.
There are also presents under the tree for me. Boxes with my name in Carson's handwriting on the tags. I do not receive a wrapped present from anyone in almost a decade. I open them slowly on the couch, with Cadie's chin on my knee.
The first is a soft wool scarf, sage green. "I picked it. Daddy paid."
Next, leather gloves from Tina, paired with a cookbook and a note in her distinct cursive:
Thought you'd like to fight me for the Chicken and Dumpling recipe. Good luck. — T
Then, Carson reaches behind the couch and hands me a small box, wrapped neatly. Which means he wraps this one twice. "Last one."
I unwrap it. Inside is a key — brass, on a leather fob stamped with a small star.
"To the back door," he says. "In case you ever lose your front one."
The key sits in my palm and warms against my skin. It isn’t for the guest room or the front door I still knock on out of reflex. It’s for the back door, the one that opens onto the back porch.
I nearly hand it back. But I close my fingers around it instead.
"Carson —"
“Don't turn it into something, Lori. It's just a key."
It is not just a key. It’s a word he does not say with his mouth, cut in brass and threaded onto leather.
I put it in my pocket.
Cadie is in the living room with her paints, presenting all the colors to Junie, who is asleep in her bassinet.
I am at the sink rinsing mugs, the water warm over my knuckles, the heavy meaning of the key in my pocket.
Every now and then, I keep pressing my thumb against it through the denim to make sure it is real.
Carson comes in for a water refill. He stops a foot behind me. I know where he is in a room at this point, my awareness of him running constantly under everything else.
I turn off the tap and dry my hands. I turn around, and he is right there.
His collar sits crooked on one side. There is stubble along his jaw he missed shaving yesterday, and the small scar at the corner of his upper lip — the one I noticed the first night at the diner counter, the one I have not stopped noticing since — catches the kitchen light.
He is holding his mug in one hand, watching me with the quiet version of his face, the one he only wears when no one else is in the room.
The key is warm in my pocket and I do not have a single word for what I want to say to him.
Twenty-five years of never asking for anything does not exactly prepare me for this part.
But the man tears up my checks and hands me a brass key to his back door this morning like it is nothing.
I am standing here with the duffel bag still packed in the guest room and every reason in the world to keep my hands to myself.
None of those reasons are louder than the way he is looking at me right now.
So I close the distance between us.
I put my hand flat on his chest and I lift onto my toes and kiss him.
His mouth is warm. The whole kitchen shrinks down to the press of my lips on his and the drum of his heartbeat under my fingers.
The kiss is innocent and brief.