by Penny Wylder
I love family Christmas. I always have. We have enough people that the pile of presents under the tree is large, and it’s fun to see them passed out. I love seeing joy brought to people’s faces by something I thought to buy them. We don’t tear into the presents either, we take turns. June always acts as ‘Santa,’ trying to make sure the gifts we’re opening are evenly distributed so no one opens all their presents at once. It takes longer, and I make sure that the snacks keep flowing, but I think it’s way more fun than everyone pouncing on their gifts and being done ten minutes later.
The twins love their headphones, and June enjoys the gift card I got her to her favorite make-up store. My own haul is good. I get some expensive tea that smells delicious, and a DVD of an obscure TV show I liked when I was younger, along with some clothes and a few gift cards. All in all, everyone seems to be very pleased by the gifts.
Even Trevor received gifts in the form of gift cards to use at coffee shops around BU. I liked watching him be surprised—I knew he thought he wasn’t getting anything at all. He’ll have a gift from me on the real Christmas day, but he doesn’t know that either.
When all the gifts are open, it’s early afternoon and we’re all starving. The house is beginning to smell like turkey. We attack the kitchen to prepare for the rest of the food, and we all fall into our familiar roles of what to do and where to be. Luckily, Richard doesn’t have to run to the store for anything. In the middle of everyone getting ready, I manage to pull Trevor aside.
“No under the table things this time.”
He just grins.
“Trevor, please. I’m serious.”
He leans down and gives me a quick kiss on the mouth. “All right. I’ll behave. I don’t want to go back to sleeping on the couch.”
I punch him lightly in the arm, and he catches me to press another kiss against my lips. “You’ll get my present on Christmas.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” I whisper.
“But I did. So there’s nothing you can do about it,” he says, grinning and pushing me back into the kitchen before anyone even realizes that I’m gone. Sure enough, when we gather around the table, Trevor has claimed the seat next to mine again. Although this time I’m not anxious. I enjoy the feeling of our legs pressed together, the secret contact grounding me.
The food is good. The best sign of a good meal is silence, and we’re preoccupied with eating for a long time before anyone speaks. And when we finally do, it’s a slow start to the conversation. It’s only when our bellies are stuffed full of turkey, trying to debate how long we need to wait for dessert, that we really start the talking.
“So,” Anna asks Bradley. “When are you guys leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he says. “We’re going to spend some time with June’s grandparents. They live down near us and are still kicking.”
June laughs. “They’re going to outlive everyone.”
“Maria,” I say, “what are your plans for Christmas?”
She shrugs. “I don’t have any solid plans. I figured I’d just drift.”
“You want to come over for dinner? It’ll be just me and these two.” I nod towards Brad and Trevor.
“Sure,” she says, and I think I hear a bit of relief in her voice. “That sounds like fun.”
“I just want to say—in case I forget because of pregnancy brain—thank you everyone for the gifts.”
“Yes,” I say, “thank you.”
There are murmurs of additional thank-yous around the table, and Bradley laughs. “You got almost everything you needed, Stella.”
“Almost?”
“Well, you got everything you asked for except a man.”
My stomach drops, and I feel Trevor go stiff beside me as people laugh. “Ha-ha. Very funny,” I say, trying to brush it off.
“But maybe he’s just not here yet,” Anna chimes in. “Who knows, maybe Santa will drop him down the chimney on Christmas day.”
“Can we not do this today?” I ask.
Bradley doesn’t listen, his words overlapping on top of mine. “You might like that. Right, Stella? Someone dressed in nothing but a Christmas stocking?”
“Seriously?” I say. It’s loud, and everyone falls silent. I don’t care, they deserve it, and I deserve to be loud. “I’ve asked you to stop. It’s our family Christmas, can’t you give it a rest? Even just for today?”
I grab my plate and take it to the kitchen. I resist the urge to throw it in the sink. Instead, I just stand there. I wonder if I should leave, take a walk, and cool my head. It might be less awkward than the deathly silence that I hear behind me. I hear the screech of a chair being pushed back, but I don’t look to see who it is, who they silently elected to come talk to me.
The doorbell rings, and I jump. I make a mental calculation, just to satisfy myself that everyone is here. They are. So who could that be? I’m closest to the door anyway. When I pull it open, I find the last person I was expecting standing on my front steps—it’s Brad’s ex, Leigh.
11
I’ve only met Leigh one time, on a short visit to the campus when they were together. I disliked her then and I dislike her even more now that she’s managed to trample all over Brad’s heart. I look at her. She’s gotten more blonde and more tan, embodying the look of a college party girl. “Hi!” she says cheerily. “I’m looking for Brad. Is he here?”
I hesitate. I don’t know if Brad wants to talk to her. I don’t know if I should say that he’s stepped out.
She seems to sense that hesitation. “I’m his girlfriend,” she adds, with an annoyed smile.
I straighten up. “No, you’re his ex-girlfriend,” I say, “and I’m not sure if Brad wants to see you.”
Her mouth drops open. Drops all the way open in shock, and she looks me up and down as if I’m the most offensive person on the planet. “I’m sorry, who are you?” she says.
I give her a flat smile. “I’m Brad’s mother. We’ve met before, Leigh.”
“You can’t be his mother,” she says. “I remember meeting her, and she wasn’t a bitch.”
A deadly calm comes over me, and I’ve had enough. Enough of everything that’s happened today with my family. This is not happening. “Well, that was before you spent months lying to my son and treating his heart like a chew toy. We’re in the middle of a family dinner, and you need to leave.”
“I’m not leaving until I talk to Brad.” She steps closer.
“He’s not available. I’ll tell him to call you when he gets back to school.”
She scoffs. “Last time I checked, your son was an adult. He can make his own decisions. I know he’ll want to talk to me.”
“Oh,” I say. “So he’s my son now? Good to know. Goodbye, Leigh.”
I start to shut the door and Leigh jams her foot in the space, shoving the door back and forcing it open. I have to step back or get shoved backwards. She steps inside, grinning and shedding her coat onto the floor.
“You need to leave my house,” I say, trying to maintain a calm I don’t remotely feel.
“Oh, fuck off. Don’t you have some prune juice to finish drinking through a straw or something? BRAD!” Her voice, already loud, echoes through the house.
I swear I’m about to hit her when Brad comes into the living room. He looks between her and me and I know that he heard what she said to me. He looks me up and down, making sure I’m all right. “It’s okay, Mom.” He looks at Leigh. “I’ll talk to you, and then you’re leaving.”
“You suddenly a momma’s boy?” Leigh asks. “Been listening to her, letting her trick you into thinking I’m some sort of bitch?”
“I’ll give you guys some privacy,” I mutter, heading to the kitchen.
I hear Brad speak behind me, voice dark. “I’m letting you stay for a few minutes because it seems better than calling the police. But if you ever speak to or about my mother that way again, I will throw you out and I will never speak to you again.”
Those words br
ing a small bit of comfort to me, but I’m still spiraling. Her words bring back memories of days with Jackson, and that’s not a place I want to go. Not now. I hear frenzied whispers as I enter the kitchen, noting that the adults are conspicuously absent from the dining room. The whispers are coming from the hallway to the bathroom. Unfortunately, the whispers aren’t quiet enough that I can’t hear them.
“Still, you know she’s sensitive about it.” I hear Anna’s voice.
“I just want her to be happy,” Bradley says. “I feel bad for her. Now that Brad’s off at school, she lives here alone. She has to be lonely. I keep hoping that maybe us bringing it up will help her want to break out of her shell a bit.”
“We’ll have to think of another way.” That’s Maria.
Sadness pours into my chest, and I can’t take it. How did everything spiral like this? What is so wrong with me that my family thinks that I can’t be happy? What did I teach my son that he’s willing to be in a relationship just like the one that cost me everything? I grab my coat from the rack and go out the back doors as quickly as I can. I just can’t be in this house right now, and the front door is blocked by the blonde bitch.
But in the back yard there’s nowhere to go. I’m not going into the tree house where all I’ll be able to think about is how many orgasms Trevor gave me. With a sigh, I sit on the steps of my back porch, pulling my coat closer around me to keep out the cold. But the silence feels good. I focus on my breathing, trying not to think. I look down at the snow, flurries gathering and filling in our foot prints from the other day.
The door slides open behind me, and I close my eyes. If it’s one of my siblings, I really don’t want to talk to them at the moment. I feel the air shift as someone sits down on the steps with me. I peek out to find Trevor sitting with me. He’s not touching me, but close enough that he could. His expression is bordering on angry, and he’s looking at the snow. “Are you all right?” he asks. His voice is soft, not angry. I realize that he’s frustrated. For me.
“No,” I say, looking back at the ground.
That deep sadness is still welling in my chest, and I feel like I should be crying. But I can’t. There’s too much there to even cry.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
He reaches a hand for me, and changes his mind. “For what they said in there. For not saying anything about it. For not helping you throw Leigh out of your house.”
I give him a grim smile. “It’s okay, Trevor. None of those things are your fault.” We’re silent for a moment. “I’m just not sure what to do. I can’t seem to convince anyone that I’m okay. That my life is really fine. And then I see Leigh, and I wonder if it’s not. If I somehow taught him that being with someone like that is okay.”
“She wasn’t like that in the beginning,” Trevor says.
“They never are.”
Another silence. I look up at the flat white sky and let the flurries collect on my lashes.
“So,” he says, overly cheerful, “I finally thought of an embarrassing Christmas story for you. It’s definitely on par with the tree and the broken arm.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about how I got grounded for a month on Christmas day.” He ducks his face down, trying to make me meet his eyes. I do, and he makes a silly face at me. In spite of myself, I crack a smile.
“Okay, what happened?” I ask. “It better be good.”
“I was twelve,” he says, clearing his throat, “and my parents had invited some important person from the local government to Christmas dinner. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of who it was, but I don’t remember. It might have been the mayor.”
“The mayor of Boston?”
“Yeah.” He ignores my shock completely. “Anyway, I was bored, and this isn’t just a one course meal. We’re talking three or four courses. I’m twelve—the last thing I want to do is sit at a table for hours when I could be off with my presents.”
I nod, trying to dismiss the fact that my sadness is easing. I don’t want to think about what it means that he’s been the one to do it more than once.
“So I decided that I would experiment at the table. Small at first, just my own plate. I wanted to see what sort of things I could catapult off a fork.”
“You didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.” He’s smiling, and so am I. “I tried a couple of beans, a pad of butter, piece of chicken. They all flew well, and I figured I could really make something fly. By the time I came to this conclusion, I had basically forgotten that I was at an important dinner. So I decided to go for it.”
“Food of choice?” I ask.
“Meatball.”
I groan. “I can already see what’s going to happen.”
“I put the meatball on the handle of my fork, and I just smash the living hell out of that catapult. The meatball flew, landed right in the middle of the guest of honor’s plate. Sauce splattered everywhere.”
I start to laugh, a deep belly laugh that chases all the lingering anger and sadness from my chest. “I would have loved to have seen that.”
“It was a great sight. And I was grounded for a month.”
“But I hope you learned your lesson,” I say, nudging him with my elbow.
“Never.”
The silence this time is easier. I find myself wanting to lean into him. I can’t think of anyone else, not even Brad, who would have been able to pull me back so quickly. Make me smile and laugh. That kind of easy freedom that I felt with him at the tree farm slips inside me again, and I feel…happy. Not just fine. Happy. Better than I’ve felt in a long time. I like my life, my life is good, but he’s made it better. I realize that I’ve been staring at him for a couple of minutes, and he’s been staring back. He sees when I realize it.
“Where’d you go?”
“Just thinking,” I say, not sure I’m ready to confess my own realization.
He nods. “I just have to say, that you’re amazing, Stella. You’re a great person and a great mom. Nothing that happened today is because of you. Your family loves you, even if they are misguided in the way they show it, and Leigh is a terrible person—that’s not your imagination.”
I laugh softly. “Thank you. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re an amazing person too. I think if Brad’s dad had been more like you, my life—our lives—would be very different.”
“So you’re saying you wish you’d had a guy like me?” He smiles.
“Yeah. I guess that is what I’m saying.”
He reaches over and takes my hand. “When I go back to school,” he says, and my heart flutters, “I don’t want this to stop.”
I swallow, my mouth going dry. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” he says, and the smile on his face makes me feel like the sun is shining.
“Good,” I whisper. “I don’t want it to either. You want to know where I went just now? I was thinking about how happy I’ve been. These past few days.”
He shifts closer to me, and it feels like we both breathe easier. My heart picks up a little, beating faster just because he’s looking at me. He wraps his arms around me, tilting my face up to his. Our kiss is sweet, laced with happiness at the idea that this isn’t just a fling. We’ll see where it goes, even if it isn’t conventional.
I try to wrap my arms around him, and fail, laughing, since my arms are shorter and our coats are bulky. Instead I let him pull me closer, deepening our kiss. I have a thought that he might warm me up so much that we might not need our coats anymore. I slip my tongue past his lips, tangling with his and relishing the feeling of freedom that he brings me.
Laughter suddenly breaks the trance, and I hear the worst voice in the world say, “Well isn’t this rich.”
12
Leigh is standing in the door, and the look on her face is one of disgust and triumph. The door behind her is open, and I see at least two members of my family looking out. Brad appears behind her, his face livid. “Don’t ju
st walk away from me into my house, Leigh.” Then he sees me, us, and my stomach plummets into an anxious free fall. There’s no mistaking the way Trevor and I are wrapped around each other.
Brad stops, all the anger draining out of his face to be replaced by surprise and confusion. Trevor carefully extricates his arms from around me, pulls me to my feet. Pulls me towards the house. He’s right. If this is going to happen, it should happen inside. I hear Leigh laughing under her breath as I pass. Brad closes the door behind all of us and I take off my coat, take Trevor’s too. Everyone is completely silent.
Until Leigh says, “Well, I guess things look a little different now, don’t they Brad? You call me a liar, but it looks like I’m not the only one. At least my lie was small, nothing like mommy dearest lying about fucking your best friend.”
I hear the hushed whispers of June as she sends the twins upstairs. I don’t look to see if they go.
“Is it true?” Brad asks.
I swallow, trying to find my voice. That nervous pit at the base of my stomach has turned into a chasm. “Yes.” I pause, not knowing how to phrase it. I don’t want to put it as crudely as Leigh did. It feels like more than just that. “We’ve been…seeing each other.”
Anna’s voice: “Oh, Stella.” I can hear the disapproval and the shame. I look at Maria, and the same look is on her face. Bradley refuses to meet my eyes. Inside, I’m warring at myself, furious at them for being ashamed of this—something that they wanted, and also sick with shame because I knew this would happen.
“How long?” Brad asks, and I can’t get a read on what he’s feeling.
“Just since you’ve been home.”
Leigh laughs viciously. “The truth hurts, Brad. Not even your own mother wants you to be the only man in her life.”