by Lily Maxton
He propped his elbows on the table. “Do you really want to?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“This isn’t just about you feeling sorry for me, is it? It’s not like we were ever really a couple anyway. You don’t have to make yourself available because you found out my mom is sick.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
He looked skeptical.
“I like being with you,” I said, staring at a point somewhere past his shoulder. “I always have.”
“Can you look at me when you say it?”
I met his eyes. “No.” And then I swallowed. And I forced myself to be honest because I thought he deserved honesty. “If I do I start to think that I might have been really stupid.”
I waited for his next remark, but all he said, after a short silence was, “I’ll call you with a good time for the decorations.”
My lips tilted in a half smile that was both rueful and amused. He wasn’t going to make things easy for me.
*
I brushed my hair in front of the full-length mirror in the hallway as I picked some lint off my black sweater. Alyssa was sitting in the recliner with a mug of coffee, peering at me over the back of it.
“I really don’t get this,” she remarked.
“You don’t have to get it.”
“Are you together or not?”
“No,” I scowled at my reflection in the mirror as I brushed my hair a little too vigorously. A tendril caught and yanked at my scalp.
“So you go from being friends with benefits to friends without benefits?”
“More or less.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a good thing, and I didn’t realize it. And I kept him at a distance when I should have let him in.”
And now it might be too late. He might be too fed up with me to try again. But I didn’t want to voice that fear out loud.
“That still doesn’t make sense.” She slurped her coffee noisily.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “This is about more than us … he needs me, so I’m going to do what I can.”
The slurping stopped abruptly. “I’ve never heard you say anything like that. Are you in love with him?”
I stopped brushing. My shoulders drooped; I seemed to deflate as I watched myself, like a sad little balloon. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I am.”
I missed him. And it wasn’t just the companionship, which was what I’d missed after Drew and I broke up. I missed Evan. I missed the way we’d been before our fight, before he’d pulled back from me—his nerdy jokes and his patience and gentleness, and the way he made me feel, sexy and confident and smart, like I was better, more than I’d ever imagined I could be.
Being friends wasn’t the same. It wasn’t enough.
“You should tell him.”
“I will,” I said. I wanted to, at least—I just didn’t know when. It felt selfish to bring it up now, like I was focusing on what I needed instead of what he needed. And he might not even want to get back together—maybe in the time we’d been apart he’d decided I didn’t deserve a second chance.
The intercom beeped and my hand flew to my throat.
Evan was here.
I realized that it was the first time he’d picked me up from the apartment to go somewhere. My stomach fluttered as I moved to the intercom to let him in. It almost felt like a first date.
*
I tried not to drink him in with my eyeballs when I met him at the door, but it was really hard not to. He looked unfairly sexy in that wool coat and those dark fitted jeans.
“Hi,” I said. “You look nice.” I could have slapped my forehead at how awkward I sounded. You look nice? And not even said casually, but a little breathlessly. Like I was a sixteen-year-old picking him up for a high school dance.
His lips twitched. “You do too.”
“So, where are we getting the tree?”
“The doctor advised against having a real one. But there’s a department store on the way to Schaumburg that has pretty nice artificial trees..”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
He stepped aside to let me pass. He didn’t take my arm or call me ma’am or make a stupid joke. I knew he would have before the Christmas party. My heart did a nosedive, and I wondered if I would ever have him back or if I’d pretty much destroyed my relationship with the only guy I’d ever loved.
I barely stopped myself from falling against him and wailing about how I didn’t want to lose him.
We were silent as we got in the car, and as we pulled onto the street and headed north. For a while, I thought we’d spend the whole day without talking to each other, but then Evan spoke.
“It’s not just the chemo,” he said.
I glanced away from the traffic in front of us to look at him. His fingers were tight on the wheel. “What do you mean?”
“She’s not reacting very well to it, but there are some days that are better than others. But even on the days that are better, she doesn’t act like herself. She’s scared or depressed, I don’t know. It’s almost like she’s afraid to do the things she normally does because she’s afraid to hope too much. Like she’s waiting to die.”
I didn’t speak for a minute as I soaked that in. I didn’t know what I could possibly say that would make him feel better. “Can you blame her for being scared?”
“No,” he said flatly. “But I’d like to think she’d fight it. For us if not for herself.” And then he shook his head. “That’s selfish, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know if that’s what I’d call it. You don’t want to lose her.”
“But being angry with her isn’t going to help anything.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” I said. “It’s understandable to feel that way.”
“When your dad was in the hospital, did you feel that way?”
I forced myself to think back to those horrible hours when we’d waited and waited for something to happen, with all the machines hooked up to him beeping under the artificial lights, and Sienna’s quiet crying mingling with them into one noise. “No. I tried not to think about anything too much at all. I felt like if I let it all in, it would break me. And maybe it would have.” I looked down at my feet, pressed them closer to the heat vent for warmth. “My mom wanted me to see a therapist. She didn’t think my avoidance was healthy. But now I don’t know if I agree with her.”
“Why not?”
“I think at the time it was the only way I could deal with it. By not dealing with it. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense to me.”
“And now … now that I’m far enough removed from it, I can look back without the pain overwhelming me. It’s there; it’s always there; but it’s not so … acute. I didn’t realize that until I started talking to you about it.”
Evan, without even trying, had opened my eyes to a lot of things. I’d been avoiding the possibility of loss for years. And I didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t need to do that. I might not have worked through my father’s death the way people thought was the right way, but I’d survived it.
All these years I’d assumed I was too weak to really confront what had happened. But now I could remember my father without breaking down. His loss hadn’t been the end of my world.
Life moved on, love moved on. It had happened without me even being aware of it.
And I didn’t want to be immobile while they swept past.
Especially not if it meant losing Evan.
I needed to tell him all of this. But I couldn’t just blurt it out on the way to his parents’ house, could I?
“What I’m trying to say,” I continued, mustering a smile, “is that everyone deals with things in their own way.”
“I know,” he said, oblivious to my inner musings. “I’m trying to be as supportive as I can.”
“Then it’s enough. Evan, having you there, knowing how much you care …” How wonderful you are (which I didn’t say, even though I w
as thinking it) … “You can’t do any more. You’re doing more than enough already.”
He glanced at me before he turned back to the road, his mouth curving. “Thanks.”
“For what?” I didn’t feel like I was doing much of anything except pointing out the truth.
“For making me feel better.”
“Oh.” I smiled, ridiculously pleased. “You’re welcome.”
We picked out a tree. The box didn’t fit in the trunk, so Evan tied it to the top of his car. And while we drove to his parents’ house, I kept glancing back, worried that it would slide off and cause an accident and there would be no Christmas cheer for anyone this year.
“My knots are perfect,” he said when he noticed.
I shot him a glare. “How do you know? Were you a Boy Scout?”
“Nah, I wasn’t really into all that outdoors stuff. But my obsession with bondage really comes in handy.”
A bad joke. I would’ve thrown my arms around his neck if he wasn’t driving. “You never tied me up.”
“You never asked me to.” He grinned, and I blinked, imagining being tied to Evan’s headboard, while he … hmmm.
I settled back in my seat for the rest of the ride, positive I had a really stupid smile plastered across my face. I let my mind wander. If we were together, really together, this was what it would be like on Christmas, we would pick out a tree together and joke in the car, and we would go home and decorate. We would make love and fall asleep next to each other. Wake up next to each other.
I knew there would be arguments. I knew it wouldn’t always be perfect. But I wanted the imperfection, too.
We drove through a housing addition, pulling up to a small one-story house with red shutters and a tidy square yard.
“How much time do we have?”
“My dad picked one of the longer movies,” Evan said, glancing at his phone to check the time. “About three hours, maybe.”
Evan carried in the box, while I did the lightweight task of holding open the front door. I followed him through and glanced around the living room. It was a cozy house—a fireplace took up one of the side walls of the living room; two plush armchairs faced the fireplace and a sofa was pointed toward the TV on an adjacent wall.
I moved closer to the fireplace when I saw pictures lining the brick mantel. “Is this your senior picture?” I asked, holding up a professional photo of a young Evan wearing a pair of black rectangular glasses. His teeth were smooth and straight—he’d gotten his braces off by that point.
“Yeah.”
“You look good in glasses,” I exclaimed.
“No, I don’t.”
“You look studious.”
“I look like a dork.”
Did he look like a dork? I peered at the photo more closely. I didn’t think so. But maybe it was because I was so close to him. Like he’d once told me, I liked all his guises.
After the tree was assembled—and just barely missed brushing the ceiling—we opened up old boxes of ornaments. There were a bunch of different ones, all piled together, sort of like a collection of memories. The first one I pulled out was a Santa Claus figurine that looked like it might be winking at me.
“Do you ever think that Santa is kind of disturbing?” I asked.
Evan knelt down on the floor next to me and looked at the ornament. “No, why?”
“Like what is that twinkle in his eye all about?”
Evan looked like he was struggling not to laugh. “His eyes twinkle because he’s full of Christmas spirit.”
“If that’s a euphemism for hard liquor,” I said, eyeing Santa’s rosy cheeks, “I think he’s had way too much Christmas spirit.” I went to the tree to hang the ornament but decided to put it toward the back, where it wouldn’t frighten small children and animals.
“Thanks for ruining Santa for me,” Evan said.
“You still believed in him, huh?”
He threw a handful of tinsel at me in response (which fluttered to the ground, missing by about three feet), and then continued rummaging through the box. A few seconds later, he came forward with a spherical Chicago Bears ornament.
“I got this for my mom about ten years ago. I didn’t know she still had it,” he said.
“You should put that at the front,” I said, feeling a little ache in my chest as I watched him smooth his thumb over the surface and then hang it carefully on a branch at the center.
By the time we were finished, the tree was laden with about fifty ornaments that didn’t match at all but that somehow provided a glimpse into the lives of his family.
Evan and I both agreed it looked perfect.
We spent the next hour decorating the rest of the living space. We put strings of lights across the entrances between rooms, and placed red and gold candles on the end tables and dining room table. Then we lined the mantel and other surfaces with tinsel.
Evan was searching through one remaining box when he pulled out a sprig of dark plastic leaves with red berries. He held it above his head, trying to look innocent.
I laughed. “You know that’s holly, right? Mistletoe has white berries.”
“Shit,” he said. “I was hoping you were color-blind.”
That made me laugh harder. But my pulse felt a little erratic. I was pretty sure he was only messing around, and I really didn’t want to complicate things, but I leaned forward and pressed a light kiss against his cheek, because I really, really wanted to kiss him.
I mean, there was nothing sexual or confusing about a cheek kiss, right? Grandmas gave their grandkids cheek kisses all the time. Although, I definitely didn’t feel grandmotherly toward Evan.
“That’s for trying,” I said lightly.
He looked at me for a long moment, just long enough for me to wonder if I’d totally misjudged, when he smiled. “That’s a pretty good consolation prize.”
“Thanks,” I said, tucking a tendril of hair behind my ear self-consciously.
When we were done, we turned off the main lights, turned on the decorations, and looked at our work.
The living room glowed and shimmered. I could imagine it with the fireplace on, walking in from a cold night to be greeted with warmth and light.
“It’s great,” Evan said.
“We’re not a bad team, are we?”
He turned to face me, his eyes glittering in the half-light. “Did you want to stay?”
I hesitated. “No, I don’t think I should.” It wasn’t because I didn’t want to though. “Your mom isn’t expecting any company. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
Evan called a taxi for me and walked me out. He paused with his hand on the side of the car as I slid down to the seat. “Thanks for helping me.”
“It was no problem,” I said softly.
And then he shut the door and stepped back. I looked out the back window as the taxi driver pulled away, wondering if this was the last memory I would have of Evan, of us together. An afternoon of putting up Christmas decorations, of laughter and playfulness, of him standing on the sidewalk of his parents’ house, growing smaller as I moved farther away.
He called me later that night, and I answered on the first ring.
“Did she like it?”
“She started crying.”
My hand tightened around the phone until I thought it might break. “Oh my God. I’m sorry—”
He laughed, cutting me off. “No, she started crying, and then she told me it looked beautiful. I think she was happy.”
I drew in a deep breath. “That’s good.” I heard someone say his name on the other end of the phone. “Are you still with your parents?”
“Yeah, my dad’s trying to cook. I should probably help him or he’ll start a fire.”
“That would be a bad end to the day.”
And when we said good-bye, I stood by the kitchen counter with my phone in my hand, staring down at it for a long time. Whatever the future held, I would always remember that good-bye.
*
; The holidays came and went, and I didn’t see Evan again. We texted occasionally, but he was spending most of his time with his parents, and I didn’t want to distract him.
On the morning before I left my mom’s house, after my grandparents and aunt and uncle had gone, I sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee with my mom while Sienna slept in. We browsed through the after-Christmas ads and pointed out things we wanted, even if we never bought them.
I leaned back after a few minutes, looked around the house I’d grown up in—the oak cabinets and the bookshelves in the living room that still contained most of my poetry collection because it wouldn’t fit at Alyssa’s apartment, the Picassoesque painting I’d done for my mom that she’d kept in the same spot for years—it felt as if I hadn’t lived there in ages, when really it had been less than twelve months. There were a lot of memories of my father associated with this house that I’d managed to push to the back of my mind.
“There was a picture of Dad when he was little,” I began. My mom paused instantly, looking up from the ad. “With a dog. Do you still have that?”
“It’s in the box with all of the photo albums,” she said. She said it quietly, like one abrupt movement or noise might scare me away.
“Do you know what the dog’s name was?”
“Friday,” she said with the slightest smile. “He told me he’d just watched Robinson Crusoe when his parents bought the dog, so he was stuck with the name.”
“Do you …” I cleared my throat. “Could I have the picture?”
“Sure. You can have any picture you’d like,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll look through them today.”
She peered at me over her coffee cup, probably thinking I was in the middle of some sort of crisis.
“Do you think you’ll ever get married again?” I asked, breaking up the silence that had descended on us.
She tilted her head as she observed me. And then, after a moment, she said, “I’m not opposed to the idea, but I think it would be hard. I don’t know.” She lifted her hands up with a laugh. “I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “So you mean there actually are things you don’t plan for?”
She leaned her elbows on the armrests. “Be nice.” But then she said, more seriously, “There are some things you can’t plan for.”