Three other teachers, Ben’s principal, and Jaroslav, the school’s slightly awkward custodian who seems to only speak Polish, are toasting the birthday boy when I arrive, and his sister Clémence breezes onto the patio ninety seconds behind me. There’s beer, there’s presents, there’s Jaroslav performing an elaborate card trick that results in the heavily-inked waitress, amidst much oohing and aahing, setting the four of clubs as the coaster under Ben’s third beer, and then we go home.
“My mouth has been watering for your meatloaf all day,” he says as we’re mounting the five steps to the front porch.
“Not the worst euphemism I’ve ever heard,” I say. “Not the best.”
He laughs as we swing through the door. The air is thick with the tantalizing aroma of…not much. If I really sniff, I can smell a hint of my gym shorts from the bedroom, but in terms of onions and sweet roasted meat and birthday deliciousness: nada.
TV’s where it’s supposed to be, I glance and see both our laptops on the coffee table, I don’t have any jewelry—would someone really break in and only steal the crockpot? I make for the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asks, scurrying into the kitchen behind me. Presumably at the sound of my wailing lamentation.
“Some asshole forgot to turn the crockpot on,” I moan.
“That would be very assholian,” he says. “You sure it wasn’t just you by accident?”
“What good does it do for it to be an accident?” I pout. “We can’t eat that.”
“Could we put it in the oven?” he suggests. Grasping at straws to save his birthday, I realize. My disappointment is out of all proportion, but it’s not like I want to start crying.
“It’s been sitting on the counter all day,” I whine. I try to push the tears back with the heel of my hand. “Raw meat. With an egg in it. Under a lid. With the sun coming through the window. I don’t even know if it’s safe to throw it away.”
“Honey.” He’s trying not to laugh. He puts his arm around my shoulders and kisses me on a wet cheek. “It’s okay. You just forgot. We got pretty…distracted this morning. Please don’t cry, it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” Why am I inconsolable? “I just wanted you to have the perfect birthday, and I wanted to make you your birthday dinner, and my birthday was the best birthday ever because of you, and now your birthday is ruined because of me and there…isn’t…any…meatloaf.” These last words I can barely manage to sob out.
He just hugs me. Squeezes me good and close, kisses my cheek again, after a few seconds gently whispers, “Shh.” My devastation washes out as abruptly as it flooded in, and shortly I gather my wits about me. “Honey,” he says again when my breathing settles down. “It’s fine. It’s just meatloaf.”
“Just meatloaf?”
“Shh,” he says, giving my shoulders a squeeze before I start up again. “Shannon. You already bought me beer. And something else, too, I think…what was it…? Oh yeah, a trip to Hawaii. I’m not trying to get all competitive about it, but I’m pretty sure I’m having the best birthday ever.”
“Yeah?”
He laughs. “Yeah. The meatloaf was icing on the cake, baby, that’s all.”
My eyes go wide. “A cake!”
He laughs again. “We don’t need a cake. We do need something though, I’m about ready to eat. You?”
I nod. I’m enjoying being comforted so I stay snuggled up to him, although I’ve regained my composure.
“You know what my very favorite food in the whole world is?” he asks me.
“Raw meatloaf?”
“More favorite than that.”
I shake my head. No. “What?”
“Birthday pizza.”
I consider this. “We could have pizza.”
“Right?”
I nod. “You love pizza.”
“I do love pizza.”
“Can I buy you a pizza?”
He shakes his head. “No. Sad people can’t pay for pizza. I’m buying pizza.”
“But…”
“No. You bought Hawaii, I’m buying pizza.”
“But today’s your actual birthday. I want to get you something for your actual birthday.”
“What, like a present?”
I nod.
“Shannon.” He takes a step back and squares himself to face me, takes my hands in his. “I woke up next to you this morning, and I’m going to get into bed on top of you tonight,” he says. “Nobody’s ever gonna give me a better present than that.”
And I believe him. Because he acts like it’s true. And because it feels true to me, too: this everyday love of ours as a gift. I love getting into bed with him at night, and I love having coffee with him in the morning, even if it’s two quick gulps before work. I love the way he’ll wake me from a bad dream; I love having someone around to do all the chopping when me make dinner; I even love the way he never ever—Never. Not ever—picks up his raggedy old misshapen underwear off the bathroom floor. Okay, maybe I don’t love that, but I haven’t choked him with any, not even with the poop-skiddiest pair, and whether he knows it or not, that’s a gift, too.
I’m so in love with this funny little man that when Santa Claus starts singing about Coming to Town, I get swept right up in the spirit. I buy Ben a handsome sweater, two books that I know he wants, and the after-shave lotion that goes with his cologne—which I think I should get a discount on since the only way they can charge seventy-five dollars for it instead of twenty-five is because they call it après-rasage, and for Ben, French words aren’t fancy, they’re just regular, but the fragrance maven at Macy’s sticks to his guns. Then I drag Ben off to the lot behind the Target to pick out a tree so I can have something to put it all under. We put up lights and Ben makes eggnog and the whole house smells like cinnamon and I forget there was ever such a thing as the Curse of the Christmas Boyfriend.
Until Ben invites me to midnight mass. Actually, the invitation itself was innocuous and quite natural. We’ve been together a year, we’ve been as good as living together for six months—why wouldn’t I spend Christmas Eve with his family? And church is fine, too, although if you ask me they could punch up the presentation a little bit if they really expect you to stay awake for an hour and a half in the middle of the night. Ben laughs when he wakes me. “Claude is carrying Louis out to the car,” he says. Clode, his brother. Lou-ee, his little nephew, age three. “Would you like me to carry you?”
“Yes, please.”
“Too bad.”
I am enticed from my pew with promises of refreshment, and we caravan to the house he grew up in in Park Hill. When the clock strikes two, the kids have opened presents, the grown-ups have opened wine, and Clémence has opened the oven and from it produced a turkey the size of a Volkswagen so golden and crispy that Martha Stewart herself would choose to go back to jail before she tried to improve upon this bird. I think surely the smell of rosemary and oranges and crackling firewood will wake the neighborhood, and I wonder if that’s happened before and they’ve all paraded over with plates, for there’s easily enough food for the whole block. There’s soup and there’s bread; there’s meat and there’s cheese; there’s wine and chocolate and coffee. There are aunts and uncles, friends from France, and friends from work, kids asleep under the tree, kids running around the table, and for a while there’s a cat in my lap, even as Ben insists there’s no such animal in the household.
Ben speaks French with his mother, English with his brother and sister, and a dizzying ratatouille of the two with his nieces and nephews, who, at ages like three and six, give the impression there’s no language you could throw at them that they couldn’t bend to their will. Sitting still in her chair, his mother looks like a modern European queen, with a scarf tastefully draped over her cerise blouse and her hair tucked into a demure chignon, as if she set her crown on a side table when she arrived. But she’s the first to call for more wine and, judging from the reactions of the people gathered breathlessly around her end of the table
, seems to have a bottomless supply of hilarious anecdotes, which she interrupts only occasionally to art-direct the flow of the party.
When, at about half past three, she calls for quiet, she gets it. She has dispatched Claude to the kitchen, and assigned two cousins to assist him in opening the bottles of champagne with which he returns. As flutes of the silvery bubbles are being passed, Ben whispers something to his mother, then bends to pull a small package from where it’s tucked beneath the tree. When he comes and shoos his sister out of the chair next to mine, Madame LaChance lifts her glass—not high, but she lifts it off the table—and the chatter drops dead, in some cases mid-sentence. She smiles recognition that her unspoken request has been honored, then says simply, “Benoît.”
All eyes on Ben, he stands up, holding the festive little box, and clears his throat. He starts to say something but doesn’t quite squeeze it out, and clears his throat again. “If you’re here with us tonight,” he finally manages to address the group, “it’s because you’re family to my family.” He puts a hand on my shoulder when he says, “Or soon will be.”
He lowers himself to one knee before me. I go from bone dry to soaked in sweat in the blink of an eye. Clémence takes my glass of champagne, which has started to slosh in my shaking hand. Ben’s so handsome and sincere, I gather that he’s been practicing this, and I laugh because I’m too nervous to know what else to do. He hands me the box, which I suddenly have no idea how to open.
I fumble with the ribbon, pick daintily at the taped seam of the wrapping; the second time I drop the box, Ben picks it up and rips the paper from it. It’s hinged, and he eases it open to reveal two hammered bands of silver. He takes one from the box, sets the box on the floor, and takes my left hand. “Shannon, I love you so much I really don’t know what else to do about it,” he tells me. “Besides ask you, will you please marry me?”
Whether it’s from his burning love for me or—admittedly more likely—what’s left of the candles on the dinner table, his hook-nosed, sharp-cheeked face is radiant. His little chest is puffed like a bird’s, and his eyes are so swollen with hope I have to tear mine away from them. He has to do this right now? God, I hate Christmas.
“Oh honey.” I put my hand on his cheek, then I take his hand in mine. I close it around the ring. I can barely whisper “No.”
When I run for the door, no one makes a move to stop me.
Chapter 3: Ben
December 25, 2010
“No?!”
I practically rip the door at Bean City off the hinges when I yank it open. I knew he’d be here, then I saw him through the window—I woulda jumped through the window to get at him except I don’t want to have to deal with all that glass in my hair. Or, you know, with hitting the pane like a crazy bird and then dropping in the street. Lest it derail my mission.
“No?!” I cry again. Seth is halfway across the store for bear hugs and Welcome homes, but gets a load of my voice and walks right past me. He turns the Closed sign along with his key in the door, then saunters into the back room to give us a minute.
Shannon looks up from his coffee. He says, “Hi,” which makes me want to run across the room and kiss him. And kick him repeatedly in the shins—I’m kind of all over the map at the moment.
“Hi?” I hurl back. “First ‘No,’ now ‘Hi?” All those words have one syllable, but they kind of make a sentence, so I’m way ahead of where I was five hours ago when all I could do was gulp at the Calvados and cry.
He smiles wistfully, as if the events of the morning where somehow beyond his control. Which really sets me off. “Yeah, so…what the fuck was that?” If he asks me what was what?, I resolve to drown him in his coffee.
“I can explain,” he promises.
So I plop my little butt into the chair across from him. “I can’t wait.” Having opted not to murder him with it, I take a sip of his coffee.
“Ben, I love you.”
“Clearly.” Two syllables, even. God help this kid if I regain my vocabulary.
“You know I love you.”
“I did think you loved me,” I allow.
“Oh my God, I love you the most,” he insists.
“Which is why you don’t want to marry me.”
“Exactly.”
I raise an unsatisfied eyebrow, and he hurries to clarify. “I mean, no.”
“You love that word all of a sudden.”
“I don’t love it. It broke my heart to say it.” He reaches to sip from his coffee, which I grudgingly scoot closer to him. “Why’d you have to ask me like that?”
“You mean with a really nice ring? In front of people who love me? Who love us,” I amend. “I do sound like a monster when you put it like that. Phew, you really dodged a bullet.”
“Why’d you have to ask me on Christmas?” he insists. “You know my history with this fucking holiday. You know I can’t marry you on Christmas.”
I feel my jaw go slack. It’s a good thing we’ve been sipping on this coffee, because if this is going to be about his stupid Christmas curse, I am going to want to drown him in it. Well, Seth’ll get me a refill if I need one.
“Shannon,” I say. You idiot. You fool. You freckle-faced knucklehead, I don’t say, but I’m thinking it. “Nobody asked you to marry me on Christmas.”
“Ben, it was like six hours ago. I thought that’s what we were talking about.”
“Okay, all right, yes, I asked you, on Christmas, to marry me, but what did you think, my mom snuck the priest home with us from mass and he was just waiting to jump out from behind the tree? April, June, October—what do I care when we get married? For that matter, what do you care when we get married? What part of this Christmas has felt curse-like to you, Shannon? I gotta know.”
“But don’t you get it?” I arrange my face to clearly communicate that I do not, and so he carries on. “Ever since Byron Juarez, every relationship I’ve been anywhere near on Christmas has gone up in flames. One year in Dubai, actual Christmas went up in flames! I’m not trying to say this Christmas is cursed. Honey, this Christmas has been awesome.”
“‘Cause I’ve had better,” I can’t resist saying.
“Okay, it’s kind of gone off the rails, but this Christmas season was great. I loved being with you, decorating our house, drinking eggnog.”
“I’m having a hard time following you,” I admit. “Where does I’m cursed! enter into all this?”
“But don’t you get it?”
“I’m really gonna need you to stop asking me that and just spit your shit out.”
“If I say Yes, I’ll marry you on Christmas, of all days, the relationship is doomed,” he wails.
“Doomed?”
“Doomed.”
“Doomed? As in, one of us will do something to the other that leaves him feeling gut-punched and humiliated? Run out on him in the middle of the night without so much as Fuck off for an explanation? We’ll both end up heartsick and empty, terrified that the relationship just fell right out from under us, and there’s no way to know how we’ll ever be able to pick ourselves back up? You mean ‘doomed,’ like that?” I knew I’d remember how to talk.
He says, “I mean, that might be a slightly more worst-case scenario than I was thinking, but yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’d just as soon avoid.”
I sit. I wait. I might gape ever so slightly. He’ll get it. He’s looking at me like, What? I sip at our coffee and watch his face; I want to see the penny drop.
There are a couple pennies, actually. When realization first creeps into his eyes, denial rears up and tries to shake it away, then his face crumples.
“Self-fulfil your prophecies much?” I ask. I know it’s not classy to twist the knife. So look away.
His mouth is moving, but no words come out, only the occasional choked squeak.
“You get that I blame you for this, right? Not some Ghost of Fucked-Up Christmas? That this was your choice?”
“But…but…No…”
“I think y
ou might ascribe some pretty magical properties to that word that it doesn’t possess.”
“But I thought…No, this is what I didn’t want to happen.”
I raise an eyebrow. And yet…
“Ben, you know the Curse of the Christmas Boyfriend is real.”
“Ooh, can I be Velma this time? You know how I know your ridiculous curse is real?”
He nods. Eager for absolution, the poor sap.
“Because I just saw you summon it,” I say. “I just got hit in the face with it, dude—in front of my mom. No wonder they all leave you at Christmas. Apparently you go crazy.”
“J.D. died,” he says.
I guess I kind of remember him telling me that, so I try to be gentle. “I know, Shannon. But not to spite you.”
“Well, no, but…” His little shoulders slump. “Well, no.”
We sit for a second. I can stand to look at him, but not for very long. But then I can’t stand not to be looking at him, and we rummage through each other’s eyes to see what else we might unearth. I mean, just because he’s taken leave of his senses doesn’t mean I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with the fool, but every time this bright spot skitters across my heart, it’s clouded over at once with the fact that when I asked him to marry me, he said No.
Finally he straightens a little bit in his chair. “Gut-punched?” he asks. The crook in his mouth begs me to retract this description.
“It hasn’t been a good morning,” is the best I can do for him.
“But I thought if I said yes…” He trails off. He already explained what he thought if he said yes. It didn’t go over. “Ben, I’m really sorry.”
“Let me ask you this,” I venture. “Do you want to marry me?”
Having rejected my marriage proposal just hours ago, now he looks at me like it’s a stupid question. Stupid how? I wait for his answer.
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