Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Like how I knew Tina might die every time she went to work, but I never asked her to stop.
Like how I knew she was chasing highs for secret subterranean reasons of her own, but I never asked her about it.
I was gentle with her. Always afraid she, or we, might break.
But in the Nar-Anon family meetings I eavesdropped on, I’d learned there were words for that kind of gentleness. Enabling. Co-dependency.
“Don’t ever be gentle with me,” Flo instructed us imperiously. “If I’m making a mess of things, I want to know about it.”
“Me too,” Jake said fervently.
“Me three.” I sat down next to him on the couch and surreptitiously took his hand, on the side Flo couldn’t see. I squeezed it.
“Is it weird for you to be here?” Flo asked him, cocking her head. “Because it’s not your mom’s place anymore.”
“No.” He looked around the room. “To be honest, it’s nice to see it come back to life.
” He tightened his fingers around mine. “It’s like the place kind of disappeared under all the junk.
Just like Mom disappeared. And I lost sight of what it used to be.
What she used to be.” He had to pause to collect himself.
“She was a big personality, my mom. Easy to anger, easy to cry, easy to throw her arms around you. She just kind of let it all hang out. But over time, it was like her personality changed. She seemed to get quieter, more nervous, until she was like a mouse hiding in its burrow.” He seemed to be struggling with tears.
I squeezed his hand tighter and he exhaled, staring up at the ceiling, trying to get a hold of himself. “I miss my mom, you know?”
“I know,” I whispered.
Hazel whined and pulled away from Flo to come sit on Jake’s feet. She looked up at him, worried.
“When Mom went into the nursing home,” Jake continued, “my sister and I talked it over, whether to keep the house or not. Marly said we could make our own decision because when she’d gifted it to Mom, she’d gifted it to all of us—me and my sister as well.
But my sister already lives in Rockport and doesn’t need it. ”
“And you?”
“Well, I would have had to buy my sister’s share of the house off her,” he said carefully.
“And I looked at the state of it and all the culch and I didn’t want to throw money at it.
And, really, I just didn’t have the heart for it.
It was too sad. But I didn’t want some developer to have it.
Or people with too much money and no sense of what’s valuable about a place like this, you know? ”
Flo nodded. She’d also crept closer and was comforting Hazel as Hazel comforted Jake. “We have the heart for it.”
“You seem to.” He reached down to pull at Hazel’s ears. “Besides, I like my place. I like seeing the ocean.”
“We can see the ocean.”
“Sure. But I’m closer.”
I turned to find him staring at me, his blue-green, glass-marble eyes calmer.
“Jake?” Flo asked. He tore his eyes away from mine.
“Yeah?”
“You should come have Christmas with us. You’re here all the time anyway.” She gave me a sly look.
“Yes, you’d be very welcome,” I said, trying to act naturally.
Jake flushed, looking both pleased and surprised. “Well, that’s a lovely offer. I’m going to spend Christmas Eve with my mother and Marly, and I promised to have lunch at my sister’s Christmas Day. But I’d love to come by after, if that’s okay?”
“That’s great,” said Flo brightly. “You can help with the dishes.”
“Flo!” I shot her a dark look.
“Joking!”
“You sure that’s okay?” Jake asked me, his fingers tightening on mine.
“It’s better than okay, it’s perfect.” I gave Flo another look. “And no dishwashing will be required.”
It started snowing the week of Christmas and didn’t stop, heavy snow with slow, fat flakes.
Our street looked like something out of a fairy tale, the balsam forest heavy with drifts, and the lazy flakes drifting in veils over the cliffs and ocean.
We’d strung lights up on our porch and they made the long icicles hanging from the gutters shine.
We still didn’t have any curtains, so the outdoor lights cast their twinkles into the parlor too, melting into the golden shimmer of our Christmas tree and the orange glow of our roaring fire.
The house was barely recognizable. It hadn’t been painted and still had smudgy walls, scuffed floors, and peeling linoleum, but there were new windows and gutters, toasty heating, and no visible culch.
I’d set Flo up a folding cot in my room and added another one for Ali.
We rearranged Flo’s room so Suni and Wayne could move in for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
I washed the windows and scrubbed the kitchen and cleaned the old floorboards.
Jake helped me hang some of the artwork around the house, following me as I indecisively moved the pictures around until I was sure where they should go.
I chose some of the moody landscapes of Maine’s coast and the maps for the hall, and a mix of botanical watercolors, oil paintings of ships at sea, and lush still-life paintings of flowers and fruit for the other rooms. By the time I was done, I was feeling house-proud and satisfied.
And I couldn’t wait for my foster family to see what I’d achieved.
“As soon as you give it a lick of paint, this place will be as good as new,” Jake marveled as he took it all in.
“Oh God, I have to decide on colors,” I groaned. I had a little sample book of colors and had been walking around the house holding the cards up to the walls and trying to imagine what they’d look like. “It’s too big a decision—if I get it wrong, I’m stuck with it.”
Jake shook his head and laughed and pulled me into a hug. Flo was busy icing cookies in the kitchen and we could hear her singing along to Frank Sinatra, cheerfully belting, “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!”
“Just pick one,” Jake said as he leaned in to kiss me. His lips were warm and soft, and he tasted of vanilla and spice. “And if you hate the color, you can always paint over it.”
“I can, can’t I? Because it’s my house.” I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him back. “I can do whatever I want.”
“That’s right,” he breathed, pressing a kiss to my neck, “you can”—kiss—“do”—kiss—“anything you want.” He lifted me off my feet. “And I hope you do it soon because, woman, you’re driving me crazy.” His mouth took mine, his tongue sliding into me. I moaned and threaded my fingers through his hair.
“What is happening here?”
Jake dropped me sharply and we both spun, turning red.
Flo was holding the kitchen door open and staring at us open-mouthed.
She was wearing a pair of fluffy reindeer antlers that we’d found among Jake’s mom’s decorations and was holding a knife that was dripping red icing all over my clean floorboards.
“Were you just kissing?”
Neither of us could think what to say. We glanced at each other, shamefaced.
“Oh, this is so good! Wait until I tell Suni!” She disappeared back into the kitchen.
Then her antlered head popped back out again.
“Keep kissing. It took you long enough.” A few seconds later I heard her muffled voice through the door, speaking in excited tones.
She hadn’t wasted a hot minute calling Suni, it seemed.
“I guess maybe we didn’t need to hide it from her,” Jake said mildly. “She seems okay with it.”
“I guess not. And yeah, I guess she does.” I couldn’t hide a goofy smile.
“So,” he drawled.
“So.” I bit my lip.
He grinned and yanked me into his arms. “Who am I to disobey your daughter?” And he kissed me like he was never going to stop. He held me hard against him and teased me with his tongue. “Maybe while your family’s in town,” he said, his breathing shallow, “you could come over to my place one night…”
“Oh, God yes.” I wrapped myself around him like a vine, feeling like my Christmas wishes were all coming true.
The snow was still flying in fairytale swirls when the Overbecks streamed into Oxeye on the morning of Christmas Eve.
Suni and Wayne pulled up first with Alison in tow, and my foster brother Lance and his wife Tasha came half an hour later.
Jake had just finished shoveling our driveway and was there for introductions.
“This place is gorgeous,” Tash exclaimed when we met them on the street.
She was the opposite of Lance. He’d always been cool, a skater-punk type, whereas Tash was an enthusiastic and very girly nerd.
She was wearing a pink parka with a beanie that had two fluffy pom-poms that looked like ears.
She bounded across the snow, excited to see our place.
Proudly, Flo and I showed her and Lance around, grinning as they oohed and ahhed over the period features.
“You should have seen this place before they cleaned it up,” Ali told them, as she carried her bag into my bedroom. “Then you’d be really impressed.”
I’d never hosted anyone before—how could I in our old postage-stamp-sized apartment?
—and I discovered that I loved it. I loved making them all rounds of coffee and hot chocolate, taking them for snowy walks through our woods, showing them the little horseshoe beach, which was currently deep in snow and rimmed with ice.
“You got your snow on the beach, Flo-bug!” Wayne exclaimed, spinning her around. They both started singing the Taylor Swift song.
As I watched them, I felt a wave of perfect happiness flood me.
“Are you and Jake the only people in town?” Tash asked, astonished by all the shuttered summer houses. The only Christmas lights on the street were ours and Jake’s.
“No.” I laughed. “But, in truth, there aren’t that many more of us.” I ran through the list of the year-round inhabitants, most of whom had gone to visit family for Christmas. Oxeye’s windswept clifftop was an icy place to spend the season, and most of them headed for sunnier climes if they could.