Harder (Caroline & West #2)(74)

I’ve never lost sight of my happiness.

Not for one minute.





West


It snowed a ton that December.

The first week of Putnam’s winter break was supposed to be Frankie’s last week of school, but it dumped so much on Putnam County that all the schools were closed.

Caroline had planned to spend the few days before Christmas with her dad, but she ended up stuck at our place.

The temperature hovered around thirty degrees. The garage roof creaked and groaned under the weight of the snow.

We ate grilled cheese with tomato soup and watched Christmas movies.

When we were starting to get restless, Laurie and Rikki loaned us a thousand-piece puzzle of the earth made up of hundreds of tiny pictures, and we spread it out on the coffee table and worked on it together for most of the morning and the early afternoon of Christmas Eve.

After a while, Caroline and Frankie wandered off. Frankie borrowed my art pencils and fussed with a drawing she wanted to give Mom for Christmas. Caroline sat on the couch researching media opportunities on her laptop, gearing up to become Iowa’s revenge porn poster girl once the holidays were over.

I stayed with the puzzle, identifying one piece after another. Matching them to their neighbors by color, shape, content, and slotting them into place.

Piece by piece, the satisfaction built until I’d finished the whole thing.

I looked at what I’d made and realized I’d spent the entire day absorbed in a metaphor.

The puzzle was the future—formless, confusing. A thousand tiny decisions I’d have to make. A thousand things to figure out without anything much to guide me but some idea of where I wanted to end up.

That night, with snow blanketing the fields and the roof of Laurie and Rikki’s house—with snow on the roads and over the stair rail and blown up into the corners of every window—we made a huge bowl of popcorn and watched The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I sat between Frankie and Caroline, my arms spread behind them on the couch, my feet up on the coffee table, lights winking on the little artificial Christmas tree that Frankie and I had picked up at Walmart.

After my sister went to bed, Caroline helped me put the presents out, and we turned off the overhead lights and soaked up the glow of the tree, watching the snow fall.

We didn’t say anything.

We didn’t have to say anything. We were here.

And as for what came next—it would be like the puzzle. Complicated, but I could take it one piece at a time.

Even though I came from a f*cked-up family in a f*cked-up place, and even though I’d been through a lot of f*cked-up shit that didn’t teach me the right things to live a normal life, I had clear eyes, curiosity, and perseverance.

I had Caroline with me.

The future would slot into place one piece at a time.


“No, I know.”

It’s lunchtime on Christmas Day.

Caroline is pacing from the front door of the apartment to the back of the kitchen. She’s got her dad on a headset, her hands sunk into the back pockets of her jeans. She’s wearing a dark green sweater with a drapey neck that looks soft and open and inviting.

She means it to be festive, and it is, but it’s so f*cking sexy, too. There’s a shadow under her collarbone where I’d love to put my mouth.

“Yeah, I know,” she tells her dad. “Sorry not to be there. I wanted to. If it clears up in an hour or two, I’ll see if I can make it tonight.”

I must be frowning, because when she passes and catches sight of me, she lifts her eyebrows and her shoulders at once, like, What do you want me to tell him? It’s Christmas.

“I-80’s gonna be too slippery,” I say.

“It might be,” she tells her dad, who must have said the exact same thing I did. “I’ll keep an eye on the weather and—”

She pauses.

Then, “Yeah. If you think that’s the best way to handle it, all right.”

“Handle what?” Frankie asks. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, drawing in her new sketchbook with the pencils I gave her for Christmas.

“Don’t eavesdrop,” I tell her. “It’s bad manners.”

“You are.”

“True.”

She rolls her eyes. “Hypocrite.”

She’s learning all these big words from the gifted-and-talented teacher. She’s been reading a ton, too—the teacher hooked her up with a librarian at the Putnam Public Library who saves out books just for her. Frankie is blowing through a book every day or two. She doesn’t want to talk to me about them, but Jeff Gorham tells me it’s good for her.

Enriching.

“He’s going to reschedule the family Christmas dinner,” Caroline tells us both. “Since they’re not sure when I’ll be able to get there.”

Frankie gives me a pointed glance and sticks out her tongue.

A moment later, Caroline’s saying, “I need to talk to you about that, actually,” as she walks down the hall toward the bedroom.

She closes the door behind her.

“What’s she need to talk to him about?” Frankie asks.

“None of your business, Little Miss Nosy.”

“You don’t even know, I bet.”

I’m pretty sure I do, though.

More sure when Caroline’s end of the conversation gets loud enough for me to register that she’s angry, though I can’t quite make out the words through the door.