This Christmas

by Olivia Miles

  She sniffed, shaking off that feeling. This was Aaron she was talking about. Her best friend. Her biggest confidant. Her cheerleader. Her rock.

  Aaron wouldn’t be disappointed in her. He’d be disappointed for her. And that, well, that was a wonderful—and rare—feeling.

  Aaron showed up at her apartment straight from work.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling her into a hug. They always hugged when they met and parted, but this time, Jules let it go on a little longer than usual, and Aaron didn’t try to stop her.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Jules said when she pulled away. She searched his face, trying to find an answer there that she hadn’t been able to reach all day. She walked over to the coffee table and picked up her glass of wine. It was her second, and the evening had barely started. She was in for a long night.

  Aaron shrugged out of his coat and left his boots on the mat. It had been snowing in Boston for at least five straight days and it felt like it would never stop. The first day it had been pretty. The second day, not so much. By day three the commute to and from work felt like nothing short of a chore. Now, she almost hoped it went on for another couple weeks. It would give her an excuse not to leave the apartment that had nothing to do with her unemployment status.

  Almost reading her mind, Aaron said, “Let’s go to the bar. I promised drinks and drinks there will be. And some fries. And maybe some of those nachos we like, too.”

  “Extra peppers?” She managed a smile and decided that he was probably right. She’d been home since noon and she was already experiencing cabin fever. And eating her way through the fried food menu items at O’Malley’s did sound pretty comforting.

  “Okay then,” she said. “Let me fix my face.” She’d cried off her carefully applied makeup hours ago, much of it on the long, cold walk home. She rarely worse much more than a bit of lip gloss, but today… Well.

  Aaron slipped on his shoes and handed her the big black parka that hung in her tiny front closet, currently overflowing with shoes, umbrellas, and seasonal clothes that didn’t fit in her bedroom closet.

  “You look beautiful just the way you are.”

  She knew that she shouldn’t read into the compliment—this was Aaron, best friend since sophomore year at Boston University when they’d shared a table during first term exams in the library and gone for a pizza afterward. Aaron that had held her hair back when she’d been over served on her twenty-first birthday. Aaron who was eager to get to the bar, where the hockey game would be playing on every screen.

  But still, she accepted the coat and put it on without a trip to the bathroom first. And she did feel a little better already.

  “You know you’ll get another freelance job,” Aaron assured her once they were seated at the end of the bar near the window of O’Malley’s, a beer in front of him, a cider for her.

  “I know.” Jules knew this, logically. Except…She looked out the window at the falling snow as people rushed by, eager to get home after a long day. “But it’s the holidays. No one will be hiring until January.”

  “Temp work?” He winced at her. He knew how she felt about that. “I’m sure that lots of places are short-staffed this time of year.”

  “It’s a last resort,” Jules said. “I already called my freelance agency. They promised they’d let me know as soon as something popped up.”

  “Well, that’s good.” Aaron grinned and glanced back up at the television that hung above the bar, just in time to see their team score a goal. It was their bar, their usual place. Nothing fancy, but comfortable, and conveniently located halfway between their buildings, only two and a half blocks from her small apartment, with one bedroom and a bathroom, on the top floor of a brownstone in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. She’d lived here since she’d graduated from college and had no plans to move. As long as she could continue to pay her rent, that was.

  She took a long sip of cider. “It’s just…” Jules shook her head. “I know this sounds crazy, but I actually wanted to stay there.”

  “That doesn’t sound crazy,” Aaron replied. He took another sip of his beer, and when their nachos arrived, ordered another round of drinks, even though her glass was still half full. Service here was always a little slow.

  She gave him a look. “Please. You know that this isn’t exactly characteristic of me. I’m not the kind of person who can settle down in one place.” The apartment was an exception, and that was because she had no need for anything bigger.

  Aaron took a sip of his beer and shrugged. “We all have to grow up some time.”

  “Nice.” She gave him a rueful look, but the thought hit her hard, square in the chest. All her life she’d been accused of being flighty and fickle, of not knowing what she wanted, of not taking life seriously enough. Now she finally had, and look how it had ended up!

  “There will be other jobs,” Aaron said, and sure, he was probably right.

  “But one I would actually want?” She frowned. “I liked it there. I liked the people. I saw myself staying there for a long time. It feels like…well, it feels like a loss.”

  “Cheer up, buttercup. You’ve still got me.” Her gave her a hundred-watt smile and nudged her with his elbow.

  She grinned back. Yes, she still had him. On days like this, she didn’t know what she would do without him. Luckily, she didn’t have to.

  “I know it didn’t turn out the way you wanted, but I think it’s a good thing that you went for the permanent position. And not getting it sort of proved to you how much you wanted it.”

  “I did.” Jules nodded. “I really liked the idea of having a health care plan. And a savings plan. Of knowing where I was going every day and who I would spend the day with. It doesn’t feel good to not know where you stand.”

  Aaron grew quiet. He raised his eyebrows. “Tell me about it.”

  She frowned. “What does that mean?” After all, Aaron had a steady job at a commercial real estate firm. He’d been promoted three times in five years. His life was stable. While hers…

  The bartender slid their drinks across the counter. Aaron drained his first glass and reached for the fresh one. “Nothing. The beer’s getting to my head.”

  Jules wasn’t so sure about that, but she let it drop. “I had friends there…” she went on, feeling a tug in her chest when she thought of the happy hours she would miss, the sushi lunches, the bow ties that Norman always wore and that everyone always poked him about, even though they secretly loved it.

  “Hey!” But Aaron grinned.

  “You know what I mean…” Now it was Jules’s turn to elbow him lightly. He felt solid, familiar, and right. So much better than sitting home alone, feeling sorry for herself. And who needed happy hours with the office crew when she had this bar and Aaron to keep her company?

  “You and I are different, I know. We’re more like…” He paused.

  “Brother and sister,” she said, at the same time that Aaron said, “Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  Oops. She hadn’t seen that one coming. Aaron stared her, something awfully close to hurt creeping into his deep brown eyes, and for lack of anything else to say, Jules said, “Or…cousins?”

  He frowned. Deeply.

  Well, now she’d done it. She swallowed hard. Reached for her cider. He reached for his beer.

  Really, they should just stop drinking. But this was only the second round. So what was going on here, exactly?

  “You know what I meant,” Aaron finally said. The game was back on, but he wasn’t looking at the screen. “We do everything together. We eat dinner together. We go grocery shopping together. We spend every weekend together.” He paused. Jules felt her stomach lurch. “It’s sort of like you’re my girlfriend. I mean, you’re a girl, and you’re my friend, but you’re like…my person.”

  Aaron was staring at her, a little frown knitting his brow, his brown eyes so earnest that she ached to reach out and hug him and never let him go. She loved Aaron.

  But was she in
love with him? And was he in love with her?

  “You’re my person, too,” she said carefully.

  “And there’s really no one else I’d rather spend my time with,” Aaron continued.

  “Me either,” Jules said honestly. She studied Aaron carefully. His ash brown hair was rumpled from the snow and his glasses needed cleaning. He was cute. Really cute. And he’d had many girlfriends in the eight years that she had known him.

  And she’d really never thought of any of this before. He was her friend. And she couldn’t ever lose that friendship. She’d lost enough already.

  They stared at the game, eating their nachos even though she barely tasted them, despite the jalapeños, and when the bartender asked if they wanted another round, it was Jules who called it a night.

  “I need to go to bed and put this day behind me,” she said. Every single part of it, she thought to herself.

  Still, she didn’t like leaving things like this. She pulled on her coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck. “Free tomorrow?”

  Aaron’s smile returned. “For you? Of course.”

  Jules’s shoulders sank in relief. “Good, then we’re going Christmas shopping. And if you help me find something for my niece, I may just treat you to a hot chocolate in return.”

  “My kind of deal,” Aaron said. “But you’d better get that thing mailed soon if you want it to arrive before Christmas.”

  She nodded. Christmas was a week from Sunday. Of course the gift would likely arrive late, but it was better than no gift at all. And she really wanted to make sure that this year the gift for Phoebe was extra special. That the little girl could feel her love from miles away. That she would know someone was thinking about her.

  Jules pulled her scarf tighter, gave Aaron a quick hug good-bye, and escaped out into the winter night. She didn’t know what had just happened back there, but she was too emotionally charged to process it all right now. It had been a long day. A bad one. And she needed to put it behind her.

  She knew that there wouldn’t be any job opportunities until after the holidays. Maybe she’d head back to Winter Lake. Hand deliver Phoebe’s present to her instead. Give her a little Christmas surprise.

  Some time away would be good, she thought. For her. And for Aaron.

  She warmed up to the idea as she turned the key in the front door of her building and hurried up the stairs. She’d think about it. But not until tomorrow. Tomorrow everything would be clearer.

  Chapter Three

  Tess

  Damn it! Tess cursed under her breath as she braked at yet another red light. It was the third since she had left the house, and she’d lived in Winter Lake long enough to know that by all reasonable calculations, she’d be lucky to get through the intersection of Main and Thatcher without having to come to a full stop again.

  She glanced at the clock on the dashboard and sighed. Phoebe would be expecting her to be visible in the audience, front and center, like always, but tonight, she’d be lucky to get a seat at all. The elementary school holiday pageant was a ticketed event, but the PTA fell short of assigning seats. Even though the show didn’t technically start for another twenty-five minutes, Tess knew that the difference between showing up forty-five minutes early and walking in ten minutes before the event started was the difference between having a view of her child or the back of a tall man’s head.

  The light turned and Tess pushed down Main Street, gritting her teeth when the car in front of her slowed to take in the lights from the big tree in the town square. They might have all the time in the world, but she had learned the hard way recently that there was no such thing. Time was fleeting. And right now, the last good seat in the auditorium was probably being taken.

  She resisted the urge to honk her horn. She could practically hear Andrew’s tsk of disapproval. But Andrew wasn’t here. He didn’t know what it was like. She was raising a young daughter on her own. Some days, she was fine. Others, she crawled back into bed after Phoebe had boarded the school bus. She needed a job but she didn’t even know what she was qualified for anymore. She’d given up her whole life to make one with Andrew. And now Andrew was gone.

  And that still didn’t seem very real.

  She pulled into the parking lot with fourteen minutes to spare, of course having to loop around until she resigned to a spot in the far corner, where the plows had dumped piles of snow. She grinned, thinking about how she and her sisters used to sled down similar banks during winter break when they were kids. Dangerous. Stupid. Lucky. They could have been hit by a car, coming down School Street. Their mother wouldn’t have been any the wiser.

  Tess grabbed the cupcake carrier from her backseat, bundled her scarf closer to her neck as the wind howled, and hurried across the slick pavement to the front door as quickly as one could with three dozen carefully frosted cupcakes in her hands. The school seemed to glow from within, even though it was only slightly past four. She dropped the cupcakes off with Jodi Swanson, head of the PTA, and former president of her twelfth-grade class, who was hovering outside the cafeteria doors. Jodi all but tapped her watch as Tess set the contribution on a table with the other baked goods. Tess stifled an eye roll, refusing to feed into it. She didn’t have time to feed into it. She had bigger problems.

  The auditorium was just to the right, and the entire room was alive with conversation. Tess stood back and scanned the rows, looking for two open spots until she remembered, of course, she only needed one this year. Surely someone had set a coat on a chair so they didn’t have to sit hip to hip with a stranger? She was thin—depression beat any fad diet, it seemed. Maybe she could squeeze in.

  She walked down the aisle, past parents clutching cameras and families jostling older or younger kids. Grandparents smiled dotingly. Christmas was a little over a week away, after all. Break had officially started. It was a busy time. A happy time.

  For most.

  Finally, she spotted a familiar face up ahead, her friend Natalie, waving to her. “I saved you a spot,” she said as Tess approached.

  Natalie had brought her entire family with her—husband, parents, brother, sister-in-law. Tess scooted past Natalie and her husband, who gave her a sympathetic smile, and the twin preschool-aged boys who each occupied a lap. Her seat was wedged between Natalie’s father, who was already snoring, and Natalie’s brother, who was tapping on his phone.

  The lights dimmed almost immediately, and as soon as the curtain rose and the third-grade class crossed the stage in single-file order, Tess saw Phoebe’s eyes go right to the chairs that she and Andrew always used to take. Today, Tess was on the other side of the aisle. She watched her little girl’s brow furrow, and resisted the urge to call out to her, “I’m here, honey! I’m right here!” But all she could do was sit and wait and hope that Phoebe would spot her.

  The song began, a rather messy rendition of “Jingle Bells,” complete with bells, that kept getting shaken when they were not supposed to be shook. Normally this was something that she and Andrew would have elbowed each other over, but she couldn’t find any amusement in it right now, not with her daughter’s face looking so lost and worried.

  The song ended, and Tess used the opportunity to cheer loudly, managing to catch Phoebe’s attention. Her expression lifted into a brilliant smile and all at once, everything in Tess’s heavy heart melted away.

  She smiled. Smiled at Phoebe smiling as they launched into the next song, which was even more of a disaster than the first and had the people behind her snickering. Tess forgot where she was for a moment, and leaned in to whisper her own commentary, but she was jolted by a rather large snort from Natalie’s father, who smacked his lips a few times and gave her a glass-eyed stare before nodding off again.

  She glanced to her left to see if she and Natalie’s brother might share a laugh about that, or at least a look, but he was still tapping at his phone. Tess could hear his wife murmuring to turn the device off.

  Right, Tess thought, her heart feeling heavy again. N
atalie was down at the end of the row, with her husband and children, where she belonged. And Tess…well, Tess was sitting in a room with hundreds of people, wedged hip to hip with two of them.

  And she’d never felt more alone.

  An hour later, Tess stood at the back of the cafeteria, nursing a plastic cup of punch, her eye on the door where the children were streaming in from backstage, one class at a time. Natalie was overwhelmed with her extended family and two now wailing four-year-olds. There were other parents she knew, of course—it was a small community and she’d seen the same parents at every event since Kindergarten, grown up and gone to this very school with many of them—but it felt strange to intrude on their family time, like a third-wheel.

  “Tess.”

  Tess was startled and pulled away from the wall she’d been leaning against. Lisa Sheehan wrestled a chubby baby to the other side of her hip. She had been in Carrie’s grade growing up, of course. Now she had a child in Phoebe’s grade and another in first. They’d all grown up.

  And grown apart, Tess thought a little sadly.

  “How’s Carrie doing?”

  “Oh, Carrie is fine. Fine!” Not that Tess would really know, but she didn’t let on. People didn’t really want to know the answer to questions like this, she’d learned. After Andrew’s accident, people would stop her at the playground or ballet class or grocery store and ask how she was doing, but when she started talking, answering honestly, admitting that she was barely sleeping or missed him terribly, their eyes would shift and they’d look uncomfortable. Soon, she realized it was best to just say, “Fine.” She was just fine. It was all fine.

  “She’s still in New York,” Tess added with a tight smile. Of this she was sure. Carrie never left New York. She’d come back exactly four times in fifteen years. She’d moved away and moved on. From Winter Lake. From her family.

  Still, Tess fixed a well-rehearsed smile on her face. Her “going out in public” face, as she called it.