Kiss Her Once for Me (49)

I think about Jack sitting on Gillian’s tailgate. We’re going to be okay.

And then when I don’t sing again, Jack belts out the beginning of the song herself. And Jack’s singing is earsplittingly abominable. That deep drum of a voice that always sounds half-musical to me somehow doesn’t translate into actual song. It’s screechy and off-pitch and not aligned to the tune she’s playing on the piano.

Yet here she is, singing anyway. So when she reaches the line, I join in with “kiss her once for me.” Our voices blend together not unlike the way Andrew’s and Dylan’s did, except where theirs were molasses, ours are peanut brittle. Inside a garbage disposal.

As we attempt to harmonize, we’re both smiling through the words, half laughing at ourselves for how awful we sound. Jack looks up at me, and she’s looking at me like she did that day. Like I’m a person who takes up space in this world.

It never meant anything.

You invented the whole thing in your head.

Two hundred thousand dollars.

But she’s singing this song for me, and I’m literally goo inside a skinsuit. I feel drunker than I am—so drunk, I might do something stupid.

I might float away.

I might touch her hair.

I might kiss her, once, for me. Just once, to remember what it felt like.

The song ends, and I have to turn away from the heat of Jack’s stare. I press my fingers to the hollows of my cheeks and feel the blush radiating off my skin.

“Gingerbread houses!” Meemaw shouts over the family’s raucous applause. “We should make gingerbread houses!”

“Barbara.” Katherine clicks her tongue. “It’s nine o’clock at night.”

But everyone is some combination of drunk and/or high, so Meemaw’s demand that we host the gingerbread house contest right now is treated with a startling degree of seriousness.

“Jack. Do you have the supplies?” Dylan asks with the same intensity they brought to the snowball fight. Except, now they’re lying flat on their back on a rug, swinging their glass of eggnog as they hum “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

“Yeah, they’re out in the Airstream,” she says, “but it’s getting late, and I think we should maybe wind down, not increase our sugar intake.”

“Don’t be a party pooper, Jacqueline,” Meemaw says. “Go get the goods! I’ll clear the puzzle from the dining room table!”

Jack looks both annoyed and amused by her family’s antics, but she throws up her hands and says, “Fine! Dylan, help me carry.”

“Dylan is not able to walk that far,” Dylan answers from the rug.

“Never mind.” Jack backpedals. “Andrew, come help—”

“I’m not going outside,” Andrew snaps. “It’s cold. Make Ellie do it.”

“You’re going to make your fiancée go outside in the cold because you don’t want to?” I ask, hoping Andrew will realize the bad optics of the situation and change his mind.

He does not, and five minutes later, I’m zipping up my puffy jacket and shoving my feet inside my boots while Jack and Paul Hollywood wait for me by the back door. We step outside onto a dark patio and take stairs down to the snow. It’s not a long walk from the cabin to the Airstream, but in the silence between us, it feels as long as our hike from Powell’s to Southeast Portland. A few minutes ago we were singing together, and now everything feels too serious.

We reach the Airstream and she puts one foot on the metal step. There’s a slight pause before she hoists open the door, and I follow her inside the Airstream without fully realizing what it will be like to step inside this place again. It’s like stepping through a wormhole into the past. Into our past.

There are the kitchen cabinets she pushed me up against. There are the cookbooks I knocked over when she hoisted me onto those counters. There is the bed where Jack curled herself around me. The smell of peppermint tea and sourdough bread. Me, crying with my boots under my arm, fleeing the Airstream as quickly as I could.

Jack catches me looking at her unmade bed. “It… it hasn’t changed much since you were here last.”

“No,” I say quietly. “It hasn’t.”

Jack makes several false starts, like there’s something she wants to say and can’t, but when she finally gets a word out, it’s “Alexa!” to the tiny Echo on her counter. “Mix Jack’s playlist.”

It’s Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” that cuts the awkward silence between us.

“You do know people have continued to make music since the aughts, right?” I ask her.

Jack smiles, and some of the tension eases. “Gingerbread house supplies,” she says and grabs a tote from under the kitchen table. “Do me a favor and grab my extra piping bags. They’re in the bottom drawer there.”

I swivel toward the narrow drawers built into the wall between the kitchen table and the bathroom door.

“Wait, no, wrong drawer,” Jack barks as I slide open the bottom drawer, just like she said. There are no piping bags. It’s a drawer stuffed with winter clothes—beanies and scarves and gloves—and right on top is a hand-knitted cerulean blue scarf I recognize immediately. My drunk heart corkscrews in my chest.

“What—why? Why do you have this?”