by Cara Bastone
“Name one way, one, that having a man would make becoming a foster parent easier.”
“Oh, I don’t know, love and marriage and steadier income and a higher credit score and holy moly your application gets accepted!” Via took a big swig of her tea like it was an exclamation point at the end of her sentence.
“And I’m going to get all that from one blind date with a man who lives half his life in San Francisco?” Fin asked with a wry eyebrow inched up her forehead.
“Well.” Via pinched her face up. “No. Probably not. But the point isn’t about the man, it’s about you. Opening yourself up.”
“To love?” If her tone got any drier she’d have to serve it with a side of butter.
“I know you think of yourself as a hard nut to crack. I know you’re happy enough on your own. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need love in your life, Finny. Come on! Even you have to admit, your whole life has been in pursuit of love. What is being a foster parent if it’s not a search for people to love and care for?”
“That’s different. That’s familial love. Of course I’m looking for that.”
“News flash,” Via said, rolling onto her side and yanking the blankets clear up to her ears. “Romantic love, the lasting kind, has a very healthy dose of familial love twisted up in it. Seb is my boyfriend, sure. But he’s also my family. The same way you are, the same way Matty is.”
Fin frowned. She could feel the truth in Via’s words. It was just extremely inconvenient to her. It was much, much easier to think that romance and familial love lived in two completely different countries, and Fin could just go ahead and stay on one side of the border and never have to bother with exploring the other side.
“And,” Via continued, “I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but you can’t just put a stopper in one kind of love and expect the others to flow freely. It all comes from the same place, Fin. If you close off part of your heart, you might just be closing off the rest of it by accident.”
* * *
“HOW WAS YOUR first day of work?” Tyler asked, nudging a reheated plate of pasta over to Kylie. Mary had dropped her off at the house about ten minutes before. Tyler had spent an evening blissfully working, losing himself in his writing. It had felt good. Natural.
He’d waited to eat his dinner with Kylie, so he dug in to his own mountain of pasta with gusto.
“Actually, pretty cool. I helped Mary rearrange part of the store and then she had me work the register while she helped customers.”
She made a face that Tyler couldn’t interpret.
“What’s that face?”
“I like Mary’s store, but there’s just so much Christmas everywhere.”
He laughed at her caustic tone. “Well, you were hired to help out with the holiday rush. That might have been your first clue that you were going to be dealing with Christmas crap.”
Kylie shoved some pasta in her mouth and spoke through it. “I hope you don’t have big plans for Christmas.”
He frowned at her. Actually, he’d been stalling and had yet to make a single plan for Christmas, but he sensed that wasn’t the right answer either, so he kept his trap shut. “What do you mean?”
“I mean...if you have really important traditions or whatever, that’s cool. I guess we can do them. But other than that, would you mind if we kept it low-key?”
“I don’t have any traditions. And define low-key.”
She pushed her food around for a second and then ate another monumental bite. He couldn’t look away from the half-masticated food rolling around in her mouth. Was she doing this on purpose? “I mean that I really like Via and Seb and Matty, but I don’t think I can handle another awkward holiday over there. Holidays are obviously so special to their family but I just don’t need everything to be so meaningful.”
He laughed again. “I guess I see what you mean.”
“Let’s just not make a big deal out of it. It doesn’t have to be a Lifetime special around here.”
“So, no decorations?”
She grimaced. “There’s more than enough of that at Mary’s shop.”
“No Christmas music, no advent calendars, no letters to Santa?”
She gave him a dull look. “I think he’s catching on.”
“Seriously, I’m going to have start eating dinner with an eye mask on if you keep talking with your mouth full.”
Her eyes on his, she thoroughly chewed every bite of her food and then showed him her tongue. “Bettah?” she asked, tongue still out.
He rolled his eyes at her, trying to hide his giddiness that she was actually joking around with him. He didn’t want to seem like an overeager dork and blow it.
“So, really,” he clarified. “You want Christmas to just be a normal day?”
She shrugged. “Nothing special.”
He wondered for a moment if this was a test that he was bound to fail. If this was one of those things where she said “nothing special” but she really meant, “Throw a huge Christmas bash. Get me a pony, bake a thousand Christmas cookies, enter us into a brother-sister gingerbread house contest.”
He took a deep breath. He had instructions from his friends to be more Tyler around her. He wasn’t supposed to be guessing what a good parent would do. He was supposed to be responding to her the way he would to Matty.
“All right, kid.” Tyler leaned back in his chair. “One mediocre, unspecial, nondescript, totally forgettable Christmas coming right up.”
Kylie, apparently immune to the magnitude of the moment, simply rose up to clear her plate. “Perf. I’ve got homework.”
And then she was gone into her room. Tyler was halfway through the dishes when his phone rang. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and raised his eyebrows when he saw it was Fin calling him.
There was a time when he would have shaved his head bald to receive an unsolicited phone call from her. But now it merely perplexed him.
“Is this a butt dial?” he answered the phone.
“Do you always answer the phone using the word butt?” Her tone was flat but somehow still amused.
He laughed. “Whenever I can work it in, sure.”
“Why would you think I butt dialed you?” He could hear some small clinking noises on her end of the line, too light to be dishes.
He tried not to groan aloud at just how sagey and smoky her accent sounded over the phone. Not good for his morale. “Because I figured if you’re calling me, it had to be a mistake.”
“Actually, I’m not calling you. I wanted to talk to Kylie. See how work went, but I think her phone is off.”
He started walking down the hallway toward Kylie’s room. “I’m not sure I’m using your crystal right.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “It’s your crystal now.”
“Right. But, like, what am I supposed to be doing with it? I just mess around with it and then put it back in my pocket and forget about it.”
“That sounds about right. But listen, I forgot to tell you that you have to cleanse it.”
“With soap and water?”
She laughed, like he’d said something utterly ridiculous. He didn’t get the joke.
“No. Put it on a windowsill that gets moonlight. Or you can bury it in the soil of a houseplant for a night. Or drop it into some salt water. Noniodized.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” she asked.
“You’re asking me to do witchcraft on my crystal.”
“I’m not asking you to do witchcraft.”
“Moonlight? Dirt? Salt? That’s some witchy shit if I ever heard it.”
“Fine, then. Forget it and just use a dirty crystal, see if I care.”
There were more light clinking sounds on her end of the line. “What are you doing right now?”
“W
hat’s it to you?”
“I’m settling a bet with myself.”
“What’s the bet?”
“That you’re doing witchcraft right this very second, on the phone with me. That you’re multitasking normal human stuff and witch stuff.”
“Will you stop calling me a witch?”
“Will you answer the question?”
Tyler leaned against the hallway wall, the phone to his ear and an embarrassingly large smile on his face.
She sighed after a long, obstinate moment of silence. “I’m bottling some tinctures that I made.”
He laughed, loud and cathartic. “Damn, it feels good to be right.”
“Tinctures aren’t witchcraft!”
He let his silence speak for itself.
“Tinctures aren’t necessarily witchcraft,” she amended.
“Uh-huh,” he said skeptically, utterly unconvinced. “Whatever you say, Cleopatra.” He paused, eyeing Kylie’s closed door. “Hey, quick question.”
“Shoot.”
“If a kid says they don’t want to do anything for Christmas, like anything at all, do you listen or do you ignore it and do something special anyway?”
Fin paused. “I think Kylie is the kind of person that doesn’t really want to do other people’s traditions.”
“But she wouldn’t be opposed to traditions of her own?”
“I don’t think she really has any traditions of her own.”
Tyler paused, frowning. “That is...supremely unhelpful advice.”
Fin burst out laughing on the other line and the sound of it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He smoothed a hand over his goose bumps.
“Seriously,” he groused. “What’s the point of having a psychic as a friend if she can’t even tell you what to do?”
Fin laughed again. He could practically hear the eye roll he was positive she was executing. “I only give the really good advice to paying customers. Will you put the kid on the line already?”
A smile on his face, he knocked on Kylie’s door. “There’s a phone call for you.”
Kylie came to the door, looking as perplexed as Tyler had felt upon answering the call from Fin.
“It’s Fin.”
He held the phone out to her and watched as Kylie’s face immediately brightened.
“Hi.”
She closed the door in his face and Tyler turned on his heel. Back to the dishes. He paused in the kitchen for a moment, studying the small window above his sink. On a whim, he flicked off the overhead lights. A shaft of moonlight sliced the windowsill in two. Sighing to himself for being such a sap, he walked across the room, set Fin’s pink crystal in the moonlight and finished the dishes in the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FIN STEPPED INTO the storage room of Mary’s store and smiled at the sight of Kylie sitting on the break table, cross-legged, flipping through a catalog and eating Chinese from the carton. In the perfect personification of what it meant to be a teenager, she looked bored and entertained all at once.
It was swampingly good to see Kylie. Fin had received another rejection letter that afternoon. It hadn’t been a shock. But still. Even as prepared as she’d been, it was hard to want something this much and not lace the cocktail with hope. In the back of her mind, she’d stayed open to the idea of opening the email and finding a miracle, everything she’d ever wanted. Instead, she’d buried her face in her hands, took twenty deep breaths and decided to surprise Kylie at the store tonight. She needed to do something caring for someone who needed to be cared about.
“Hey.”
Fin stepped forward as Kylie’s head snapped up. “Hi!”
“Taking a break?”
“Yeah, it’s actually a slow night tonight. Mary said I could take off early, but Tyler’s at the Nets game so I figured I’d stick around until Mary was done.”
“I brought something for you.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a little fabric drawstring bag that she’d sewed just for this occasion.
Kylie’s eyes lit up as she took the bag from Fin’s hand. “This is cool. Did you make it?”
Fin nodded. “And there’s lavender sewed into the lining so if you’re having trouble sleeping, you can put this next to your pillow. It’ll help.”
“Okay. I—Wow. Fin. I love them!” Kylie had upended the bag and out came the two bracelets and the necklace that Fin had made for her. All of them had the hematite that Kylie had picked out before, silvery and opaque. The necklace was a pendant on a long silver chain that Fin figured Kylie could hide under her shirt if she wanted. The bracelets were chunky and matching, made of many stones strung together.
“I hoped you would.” Fin helped her put the necklace on, and Kylie slid one bracelet onto each wrist. The color suited her pale skin and red hair.
She explained how to cleanse them and though Kylie looked a little skeptical, she didn’t crack any jokes the way Tyler had.
“Hey, have you done any New York Christmas stuff?” Fin asked. “We could go see some.”
Kylie’s smile froze. “Um, I’m actually not that into Christmas.” She forced a smile on her face. “But I guess the Rockefeller tree could be cool.”
Fin laughed. “Such a polite girl. But no, that’s not what I meant. Here.” Fin pulled out her phone and googled an image of Rockefeller Center at Christmastime. “There, now you’ve seen that. What I have in mind is much cooler. Trust me. Even if Christmas isn’t your cup of tea, you’ll like this.”
“All right,” Kylie shrugged. “Let me check with Mary. And will you let Tyler know?”
Fin closed the storage room door so that her phone call wouldn’t disturb any of the customers in the store and for the second time in a week, she dialed Ty’s number.
“HELLO?” he shouted at top volume into the phone. The roar of the crowd nearly drowned out his words and blew out her eardrums.
“Wow. Hi.”
“FIN?”
“Yes, Ty, can you hear me?”
“HANG ON.” There was the sound of a door slamming, footsteps, more yelling, one more door and then quiet. “Hey, sorry. I’m at the game.”
“What? I can’t hear you, I’ve lost all hearing in my left ear.”
“Oh, sorry, was I shouting?”
They both laughed.
“I’m at Fresh with Mary and Ky.”
“So jelly. That sounds fun.”
She rolled her eyes and suppressed her smile. She didn’t know a single other grown man who used the word jelly. “Sounds like things are pretty dead here and I was wondering how you’d feel about me taking Ky to see the Dyker Heights lights.”
“Oh. Huh. I forgot about them. I haven’t been for years, but I guess they are pretty kick-ass.”
“Is that a yes?”
“If she wants. What time will you have her home?”
Fin checked the time on her phone. “Ah, ten?”
“Cool. I’ll already be home by then, so you can just send her up.”
Confusingly, that caused a bite of disappointment in Fin’s gut. Frowning at her own reaction, she made a sound of approval.
“All right,” he said. “I should get back to it. Have fun.”
“You too.”
The line went dead and Fin listened to the silence for a moment.
She and Kylie polished off the rest of the Chinese food that Mary had provided for dinner, and then the two of them hailed a cab. It would be a mighty expensive cab ride to get all the way from Cobble Hill to Dyker Heights, but Fin didn’t mind. She liked spending money on Kylie.
As Fin had known she would, Kylie used the map on her phone to track their progress through Brooklyn. Kylie shook her head, a smile on her face, as three texts in a row dinged through.
“Ty’s checking up on me,” she told Fin.
; Fin watched as Kylie tried to hide her pleasure behind a roll of her eyes.
“Doesn’t seem like you mind so much,” Fin said with a small smile.
“It’s annoying, but not so bad,” Kylie conceded. She clicked off her phone and looked out the window for a second. “Ty’s actually not so bad. For a while he was so freaking stiff. It freaked me out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Um, like, no sudden movements. He would only ask the most boring questions, he was totally determined to pretend like this was all normal. And the neat-freak thing really bothered me for a while. I didn’t even want to leave my shoes by the door. But he’s started acting a little bit more like a person around me. More relaxed. More like he used to be on the phone.”
“You used to talk on the phone a lot?”
“Once a week. And he was always funny. Not as weird as he was when I came to live with him.” Kylie bounced her phone on her knee, looking out the window still. “It’s kind of funny because I know more about him from the internet than I do from actually talking to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. We’ve only known the other one existed for a couple years. You knew that, right?”
Fin nodded. Via had mentioned it once.
“It’s kind of crazy to find out you have a forty-year-old brother. So I googled him.”
“What’d you find?” Fin could only pray that Ty’s little sister hadn’t stumbled across his dating profiles.
“Um, mostly his sports articles and stuff like that.” She was quiet for a minute. “He’s a good writer.”
“Mmm,” Fin said noncommittally. She didn’t want to admit to how many of Ty’s articles she’d recently read, fueled at first by curiosity and then by genuine interest. He really was a good writer.
“But it was all the dancing stuff that threw me for a loop.”