“If you want to see a baby, you can go hold Baby Mabel,” Aidan says.
“I know, but it’s not the same,” she says with a wobbly smile, and I wonder if part of her emotional reaction is because she wants a brother or sister for Aidan.
Her voice jars me out of the thought. “We forgot the Christmas music!”
She grabs her phone, and seconds later Christmas music is playing from a speaker on the mantel.
It’s “Jingle Bells,” so I start singing. “Come on, Aidan. Sing with me.”
Soon the three of us are singing, and Mary starts to dance a little. It’s a simple shimmy, nothing like what she did on Friday night, but she still has a rhythm and natural grace most people can only wish for. She grabs Aidan’s hand and gets him to join her, then turns to me. Grinning, I take her hand and twirl her, giving Aidan a twirl next so he doesn’t feel left out.
This is what we needed to move past our awkwardness. We talk and laugh, sing and dance as we finish decorating the tree, until all that’s left is the star that goes at the top. Mary holds it in her hands and stares at it for a few seconds before handing it to me. “Here, Jace. You’re tall. You should put it on.”
I can easily reach the top without a stepladder or chair, but this is their tree, not mine, so I hand it to Aidan. “I think Aidan should have the honors. I’ll lift you up, and you put it on. Are you good with that?”
He nods, so I grab his waist and lift. With Mary’s direction, he gets it on top. Then I lower him and adjust the star, knowing that it would drive Mary crazy to see it listing to the right.
We all take a step back, Aidan between us, and study it, “O Holy Night” playing on the speaker. This is one of those picture-perfect moments you see on TV or in one of those Hallmark movies Mrs. Rosa is always going on about. I know it’s not mine, but I let myself have it anyway.
“It’s the most beautiful tree I’ve ever had,” Mary says, her voice full of tenderness.
“I’m glad we saved it,” Aidan says, “but it still has bare spots.”
“True,” I say, “but I think those imperfections are what make it so wonderful. It’s beautiful because of them, not in spite of them.”
Mary turns to look at me, and there’s a softness on her face that makes my chest tight. I’m physically aching with the need to touch her. To hold her in my arms.
“I think I should go,” I say. Before I do something I’ll regret.
The song ends, and the beginning notes for “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” begin to play.
“But you haven’t had any cookies yet,” Aidan says, grabbing my hand. “And you haven’t even seen Mom’s new room.”
“She has a new room?” I ask, quirking my brow.
She clears her throat. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“I think I should be the judge of that,” I say with a laugh. “Aidan, lead the way.”
He starts down the hall, and I follow, wondering what I’ll find. I saw all those boxes, but she didn’t open any of them before we left to help Roger.
The painting Mary bought is still hanging on the wall, but she’s added an emerald green duvet cover, an old-fashioned Tiffany lamp on the bedside table, and a few other prints to the walls. Those small changes have transformed the room, and it feels totally different. More like the Mary I’m getting to know.
“She bought a painting,” Aidan says in awe. “A real one.”
Obviously, I can’t let him know I’ve seen it before. “It’s beautiful.”
He moves to the dresser and opens a drawer. “And she got new underwear too.” He lifts up a lacy black bra and matching panties. “But they feel itchy.”
I freeze in my tracks, my imagination running wild.
Did I inspire her to buy that?
“Aidan!” Mary protests, hurrying over and snatching the underthings from him and shoving them back in the drawer. “Jace doesn’t need to see those.”
“But it’s not fair. You got new underwear, but I didn’t.”
“You will,” she says, her face scarlet, “when you grow just a little bit more.”
The chorus for the Christmas song filters back into the bedroom. Aidan tilts up his head, then knits his brows. “Did that man’s grandma really get run over by a reindeer?”
“On that note, I better go,” I say, making a beeline for the door.
“Coward,” Mary teases behind me.
When I first arrived, I convinced myself I was brave just for being here. But maybe she’s right. Maybe I am a coward.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mary
Pulling out the ornaments from our other life affected me in a way I hadn’t expected. Instead of remembering sweet moments—Aidan’s first Christmas, the way he used to call Santa Santer, and his fierce loyalty to Donner, his favorite reindeer—I found myself remembering the way Glenn had always delegated the buying and wrapping of Christmas gifts to me, including mine from him, since I was more “into that.” He’d missed Aidan’s actual birth, for goodness’ sake, because he took a work call in the delivery room and slipped away for “five minutes.”
We’d never really been a family, the three of us—it had always been Aidan and me, with Glenn off living his life. He might be having second thoughts about the way things went down, but his actions over the last six years suggest a theme. I can practically hear my mother telling me, When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
I still haven’t answered Glenn’s text from the other night, the one he sent a suspiciously short time after Ruth and Tom would have arrived back in Charlotte.
Nor have I responded to the follow-up message he sent last night, asking to speak with me. We can even make an appointment. I know you love making appointments.
The thing is, even though I don’t want Aidan to feel abandoned, he was abandoned. Until I’m positive that Glenn is sincere, I’m not going to let him slip in and pretend he didn’t wake up one day and decide he didn’t want to be a father. Because, frankly, Aidan is not going to stop being autistic. He is smart, and beautiful, and utterly himself, and he will always be different. I love him for him. Can Glenn?
I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but do I really want to stand in the way of Aidan having any kind of relationship with his father?
I have no answer.
All I know is that Glenn would have walked away from decorating the tree, or maybe paid someone to do it. But Jace…
Jace could have so easily put on that star himself. It would have taken him ten seconds, maybe less. But instead, he saw another opportunity to give joy to my son, and he lifted him up. Then he looked at me, smirking a little, and straightened the star. Now, lying in bed, feeling a strange thrumming in my chest, that’s all I can think of. Jace giving me that look.
He gave me plenty of other looks tonight, ones that filled my body with heat and remembered pleasure, but that’s the one that stuck.
The strange ache it left in me is the reason why I finally sneak into the kitchen and pull the pink vibrator out from under the Woody towel, jumping and tossing the thing in the air when the HVAC system rumbles behind me. The vibrator falls onto the cutting board, as if it were a cucumber waiting to be diced for a salad. Face burning, I stuff it back into the towel and then tuck the towel under my arm. As I head down the hall, I listen for sounds of Aidan stirring, but there’s nothing.
After washing the vibrator three times, I bring it back into my room, feeling a little less sure about the whole thing. My pajamas. That has to be it. I feel ridiculous using this thing in my old panties and plaid Christmas pajamas, so I put on the black bra and panties that Aidan waved in front of Jace.
When I finally turn the vibrator on, jolting a little from the sound and the sensation—good grief, why don’t women use them all the time? Why don’t underwear companies build them into panties?—I imagine Jace’s hands on me, the warmth and weight of them, the confidence with which he wields his beautiful body. And I imagine straddling him the way he ins
inuated last weekend, one leg on either side, his hands cupping my breasts and touching me just above the place where our bodies meet as I ride him.
It feels good—no, it feels great—but afterward, there’s still a sense of emptiness. Of loss. Because I only imagined him. Because he wasn’t actually here. Because logic and sense aside, I wanted him to be.
“Was I unclear?” Nicole asks with a deep, beleaguered sigh, as if she’s a disappointed parent. “Did I stutter in my delivery?”
“What do you mean? You wanted me to use the…” I look around, even though Aidan went to sleep an hour and a half ago, and it’s unlikely a burglar has broken into the house and hidden behind the Christmas tree without making a sound. “…vibrator,” I whisper, “and I did! I’ve been using it all week.” My face heats. I didn’t mean to admit to that. That first time was all I’d planned to tell her about. She’s been busy for the last week and a half, doing things undisclosed, so this is our first in-person get-together since the night of the margaritas.
Since your night with Jace.
She’s texted a lot, of course, and dispensed two additional challenges. The first was to order something I didn’t need just because I wanted it. (I argued that I hadn’t needed the vibrator, and she kept sending the eggplant emoji until I agreed to do the new challenge. So I bought a tube of expensive red lipstick to replace mine, which I realized was at least five years old.) The second challenge was to refuse the next time someone asked me to do something I didn’t want to do. (This turned out to be Hilde, who asked me to take a look at the raised rash on her leg. I was quite happy to say no and refer her to a dermatologist recommended by Maisie.)
And then there’s Jace. We’ve been spending quite a bit of time together, he and Aidan and me. Last week, the day after our tree-decorating extravaganza, Aidan and I came home to find a package waiting on our doorstep—not a vibrator this time, but an ankylosaurus model ordered by Jace. Aidan insisted on FaceTiming him (really, it didn’t take much persuading), and he answered at a job site. A suspiciously familiar voice in the background suggested it was Cal’s job site, and it was a house, which told me (a) Molly’s totally getting a house for Christmas, and (b) shit, I can’t tell her. I asked Jace for confirmation, but he refused to destroy the surprise.
Seeing him like that, working on a gift for my sister, even if he wasn’t the one giving it, his white shirt dotted with sweat that made it cling to his muscles and show the curving lines of his tattoos…it stirred something in me.
I took the vibrator out again that night.
Then he came over on Thursday to build the model, and he insisted that we order pizza so I could spend time with them instead of being stuck in the kitchen. Once again, Aidan ate every bite on his plate. Afterward, we made hot chocolate, and Aidan serenaded us with a song he’d written about an ankylosaurus’s first Christmas. Then he insisted that he wanted Jace to read him a bedtime story, and to my shock, Jace did just that. Afterward, when Aidan was asleep, Jace and I sat talking in the living room, with the tree lit up like a beacon and a fire roaring in the fireplace. And suddenly, it was midnight. Saying goodbye to him that night, I had the urge to lift onto my tiptoes and kiss him, to ask him to stay. From the way he was looking at me, he would have.
But I let him leave and then returned to my room with the pink vibrator.
On Saturday, I helped Anette at the dance studio, and the experience filled me with such giddiness, such gratitude, I went out and bought two small Christmas trees. Aidan and I brought them over to Jace’s apartment building, one for him and one for Roger, along with an assortment of colored bulbs. After helping Jace decorate his tree, we went over to Roger’s and strung popcorn for his tree, because that’s how he and his wife had always done it, and Mrs. Rosa came by with enough cake to feed an army. Aidan didn’t have a single meltdown, until I tried to get him into the car to go home.
We saw Jace on Sunday too, because Dottie texted me that a local clay shop was having a special dinosaur night. I told Jace that Aidan had asked me to invite him, but in truth, I was the one who wanted him there. Midway through the activity, Aidan got upset because he got paint on his nose, so Jace immediately dotted his own nose with blue paint. Using the wipes I carry everywhere, I wiped off both of their noses, and a weird feeling came over me as I touched Jace’s face, a stirring of something that was more than the desire I feel every single second he’s around.
And then he came over yesterday, because it was Tuesday, and it was beginning to feel a lot like our night. He and Aidan and I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, which Jace said was his favorite Christmas movie, and made gingerbread cookies shaped like dinosaurs. I put some together for Roger and Mrs. Rosa, even though, let’s be honest, (a) she’s a better baker than I am, and (b) she probably doesn’t need two dozen misshapen dinosaur cookies.
Needless to say, I used the vibrator then too, after Jace left at eleven thirty-two. (Yes, I looked at the clock. I’d wanted him to stay longer, but he’d gotten up early for work and was yawning, and I had court in the morning.)
It’s Wednesday now, which means tomorrow is another of our nights. The plan is to help Aidan make gifts for Molly and Cal, Maisie and Jack, Tom and Ruth, and even Dottie. (He still talks about the day she babysat him. Possibly because she told him she thought he might have been an ankylosaurus in a different life.) Inspired by clay night, he’s decided he’s making everyone dinosaur ornaments for their trees. Baby Mabel gets a dinosaur stuffed animal he picked out at a toy shop the other day. Jace said he’s going to make ornaments for Roger and Mrs. Rosa too.
I’m hoping he’ll stay late again. I found a recipe online for thumbprint cookies. There’s a good chance he’ll like them, because he mentioned they were always his favorite Christmas treat.
I feel Nicole staring lasers into the side of my face. She’s been here for about a half hour, and I’ve filled her in on everything from the last week and a half, most of which she seemed to find boring (a) due to its lack of sex and (b) because she seems to find most things boring.
“You should be proud of me.”
“Yeah, you deserve a real pat on the back for downgrading to a vibrator,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I only wanted you to use the vibrator because I figured it would take us at least a few months to work up to a man. But a sexy-ass man was delivered into your lap—gift wrapped! Hell, there was probably a bow around his cock—and you’re using a vibrator? I told you not to apologize for what you want, yet here you are making excuses for why you can’t have the best sex of your life with a man you’ve apparently been seeing almost every night. God, I hope Tina isn’t this stupid.”
“You’re not supposed to compare your children,” I say, which is about as close to sarcasm as I’ve ever come, but what can I say? Nicole pushes me to it. Still, I can’t pretend that her words don’t poke something slumbering inside me.
“Supposed to…? That’s your whole problem,” she says, getting out a flask from her bag and dumping something into her hot chocolate. She lifts the flask, silently offering me some, and I consider it for a moment before shrugging my agreement. Her boyfriend is her ride, and I’m going nowhere. So why not? Her lips tip up a little in approval, and my drink gets the same treatment. “You care too much about what you think you’re supposed to do. There are no rules, Mary. Only the ones we set for ourselves.”
“Obviously, there are rules,” I sputter. “If there weren’t, I’d be out of a job. There would be anarchy.”
She shrugs. “There could be worse things.”
“I like my job, and I’d prefer to teeter on the edge of anarchy than take a bath in it, thank you very much. Besides, you know why I can’t sleep with Jace.”
Another sigh, this one probably directed toward Aidan. “Can’t your kid get attached to some other guy? He’s got, like, two uncles in a ten-mile radius. A super-hot buddy is wasted on him. Find him a dude with a janked-up face.”
I feel like arguing, but then again, this is Nicole. Th
ere’s no point. Something tells me she wouldn’t understand the way it felt to watch Jace lift Aidan to put that star on our tree.
Fingers snap in front of my face, and I jolt. “You’re mooning over the buddy again,” Nicole says. “It’s not healthy.”
“Don’t you moon over Damien?”
She nearly spits out a mouthful of spiked hot chocolate. “Maybe,” she says with a smile, “but then I hop on his dick. So at least something good comes of it.”
“You’re trying to shock me.”
“I don’t need to try.”
I take a sip of my drink too, feeling the warm kick of the whiskey down to my toes. “Is this a ploy to get me drunk again because of what happened after the last time we went out?”
“You mean how you immediately got busy with Jace? No, but it’s not a half-bad idea. Or at least it wouldn’t be if your kid weren’t home.”
I look at her, shocked. She didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d care about innocent ears and eyes.
She must be able to read my expression because she shrugs. “You’re a good mom. You don’t seem like the kind of mother who’d pull a peekaboo surprise with a new boyfriend in the house without any kind of warning.”
For some reason, her answer puts tears in my eyes, and because I suspect Nicole would leave if she saw them, possibly setting something on fire on her way out, I take a hearty sip of the cocoa instead.
“Thank you,” I manage in a mostly flat voice.
“So the detective you hired for Jace hasn’t found anything yet?” she asks, as if she’s ready to move on from talking about emotions.
“No. But he will.” I feel it in my bones. He couldn’t start working on Jace’s case immediately, so he’s only gotten in a couple of hours so far, but he said he feels it too—the kind of hunch you get after working around crooked people for years. Dottie Hendrickson would probably have a word for it, and possibly even a crystal to use in such circumstances. Maybe I’ll eventually be brave enough to go back to Tea of Fortune and ask her.
Jingle Bell Hell (Bad Luck Club) Page 24