Kiss Her Once for Me (47)
“Believe me, it can. It’s a very saturated market.”
“It can’t fail,” I say with more force, attempting to use Jack’s own words against her, “because even if it never turns a profit, and even if it closes within the first year, you tried. You took a damn risk. People who take bold risks to go after their dreams are never failures.”
“Shit.” Jack looks appalled. “Do I always sound like a cheesy motivational poster hanging in the office of an out-of-touch high school guidance counselor?”
“Literally always.”
Jack flashes me her full, goofy, infectious smile, and I feel like that is written on my bones. Her smile is stamped on every nerve ending in my body. Two hundred thousand dollars. I chant the words in my head. I’m here for two hundred thousand dollars.
I’m here for the chance to rebuild my life. I’m not here to stare at Jack’s forearms while she mixes semisweet chocolate chips into boiling milk. And I’m definitely not here to rekindle something that only burned me the first time around.
The dough is successfully rolled out in front of me, and I open the Tupperware of cookie cutters in the shape of reindeer and Christmas trees and snowmen. There’s a snowflake cutout at the bottom, and I press the sharp edges of it down into the dough. When I pull away, a perfect cookie snowflake pulls away with it.
“Look at that,” Jack says. She’s at my back again, with her heat and her solidness and her bread smell. She hands me a baking tray, and I lay out my one dough snowflake.
I’m not thinking about Jack with snowflakes in her hair.
Chapter Thirteen
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Throughout most of my childhood, I responded to my parents’ dysfunction and neglect by turning inward, by becoming quiet and small. My parents would drink too much and scream at each other in the kitchen until at least one of them shattered a glass, and I would hide in my bedroom for hours, disappearing inside my drawings and the fictional world of my art, building a better home inside an imaginary space where people like me triumphed, where we were celebrated, where we were loved.
My dad would take off for weeks at a time, and I would make the honor roll.
My mom would get fired from another job, and I would sign up for another Advanced Placement class.
There wasn’t always food in the refrigerator or an adult at home, but I never misbehaved in class, never got in trouble, and formed unhealthy attachments to all my female English teachers. When I realized my art got me the kind of positive attention I never received at home, I built my entire identity around being Ellie the Art Girl.
For the most part, I was the perfect daughter to the world’s most imperfect parents, but for a brief period of time in the seventh grade, all I wanted to do was yell at my mom. I yelled at her about her constant partying. I yelled at her about the unpaid bills. I yelled at her about the strange men she brought into our house.
And Linds, being Linds, would always yell back. I would stomp and slam doors, but Linds would say the cruelest thing in the most cutting tone. Linds would give me the silent treatment for days on end in our own house, refusing to talk to me as I ate breakfast cereal for dinner or did my own laundry. Sometimes, she just wouldn’t come home for a few nights, and I would be left to wonder if she was ever coming home at all.
The fighting-with-my-mom phase was short-lived once I realized there was no guarantee that Linds wouldn’t just take off like Jed had. What several therapists have deemed an insecure attachment style means I now avoid arguing with my mother at all costs. It also means that after the Christmas-cookie argument, I’m anxious that things among the Kim-Prescotts are going to be tense.
Instead, they are… not.
Andrew and Dylan come back inside to help me decorate the cutout cookies with frosting and sprinkles, and Katherine’s headache wears off in time to press the dasik cookies using the baking molds that belonged to her halmoni. As soon as five o’clock hits, Meemaw’s pulling a pitcher of sangria from the fridge and blaring some Kacey Musgraves Christmas music. The kitchen is a disaster zone, so we throw leftover short rib or beef tenderloin over bowls of rice and eat at the counter while we finish decorating. Mostly, we eat cookies for dinner because we’re all a little stoned. The earlier argument about money is entirely forgotten.
I guess maybe that’s how it works in families who love each other unconditionally: you can fight without fear of losing them and be honest without consequences or repercussions.
* * *
Alan promises he’ll be there Tuesday morning to go pick out a Christmas tree.
He’s not, and we don’t.
Instead, we spend most of the day working on a giant Christmas puzzle. We go into separate rooms to wrap presents for each other to put under the hypothetical tree. I go with Andrew and watch the carnage of his attempts to wrap presents—the amount of tape he uses should be an actual crime—until he finally concedes and lets me do all the wrapping. Lovey makes vegan lasagna for dinner, and we all eat together, pretending not to notice the conspicuously empty chair at the head of the table. Everyone seems a little morose as we move into the evening’s event.
Christmas carols: two hours.
At seven o’clock sharp, Katherine ushers the entire family from the kitchen into the living room. There isn’t actual caroling involved in Katherine’s Christmas carols, since we’re isolated in a cabin in the mountains with nowhere to carol to. There’s an upright piano tucked into the corner of the living room, and we all gather in a semicircle around it. Meemaw pours the sangria, and Dylan rushes off to fetch their guitar.