My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(26)

I sat there, looking at my hands and thinking about back home.

Christmas Eve is always better than Christmas for us Espinozas. All the cousins and aunties and uncles show up at my grandma’s, and the whole place smells like tortillas and chile colorado, and Auntie Cecilia brings in heaping plates of sweet tamales, and my uncle Guillermo sneaks us hits off the Patrón bottle he always dresses up in Christmas wrapping paper (“A little present for my own self, esé!”). In the living room, all the men tell stories about work, while the women in the kitchen tell stories about the men. And the whole apartment is filled with nonstop laughter, even when one of the little ones knocks something over, a glass frame or crystal figurine, we all just laugh and laugh and laugh, even Grandma as she sweeps the glass shards into her ancient metal dust pan.

Home, man.

I missed that shit so much.

I missed them.

“There’s no way I’m going to let you starve down there on Christmas Eve,” Haley said, walking back into the dining room with a plate full of food. She set it down in front of me.

“I wasn’t starving,” I said, staring at her beautiful dinner.

She lowered her eyes at me. “Yes, you were, Shy.”

“Okay, maybe a little.”

Why was she doing all of this for me? I wondered. Because I’d loaned her Mike’s shower? If that was it, she was definitely getting the raw end of the deal. All I’d had to do is let her in the front door. Judging by what was on my plate, she’d busted her ass in the kitchen. She’d grilled some sort of white fish and made roasted potatoes and sourdough bread and these broccoli pieces with long stems I always forget the name of.

“You want a Pinot Gris or a Chardonnay?” she shouted from the kitchen.

“Are you talking about wine?” I called back.

She came out with a second plate of food and set it down across from me. “Of course I’m talking about wine. What else would I be talking about?”

“When it comes to that stuff,” I told her, squirming in my chair, “you’re gonna have to dumb it down a little. All I know is red or white.”

She stood there, staring at me. “Well, they’re both white. White goes with fish.”

“So, that settles it then,” I said. “We’ll go with the white.”

“I know, but—oh, forget it.” She went back into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of wine and poured our glasses full. “Cheers,” she said, holding up her glass.

“Salud,” I said, the way my old man always does.

We clinked glasses.

After the half dozen muffins I’d wolfed down for breakfast—that’s right, I ate every last one of those bastards—I was no longer desperate. But my entire body came alive when I started putting down Haley’s perfectly grilled fish. This was real food. With real nutritional value. I felt like I was turning from a floppy, stuffed bear into an actual human being.

The wine wasn’t hurting, either, and Haley was quick to refill our glasses.

“Oh, and don’t think you’re getting off the hook,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The truth game,” she said. “Just because I didn’t take a shower tonight doesn’t mean we’re not sharing.”

“This dinner’s amazing,” I said, pointing at my half-empty plate.

“It’s just baked cod.” Haley paused for a few seconds before adding: “But thank you. I need to be better at taking compliments.”

“You go first this time.” I stabbed another piece of long-stemmed broccoli. I don’t know why, but I was excited to hear what Haley had to share. Maybe I was kind of getting into her corny game.

“Okay.” Haley took a sip of wine and then just sat there, holding her glass, like she was thinking. “Sometimes I worry. About myself, I mean. I don’t have a … ‘thing.’ I got good grades all through high school, right? Strike that. I got very good grades. I was valedictorian. And I scored high on the SATs. And I had all the extracurriculars my counselor said I should have for my college applications. I volunteered at a mental health clinic during sophomore year, but I only did it because I knew it would look good. Messed up, right?”

It was at that moment that I realized how truly beautiful Haley was. She had a perfect complexion and high cheekbones and there were these cute little freckles surrounding her nose. But I don’t just mean physically. A lot of girls look good to me—I have what you might call a flexible aesthetic. But there was something about Haley that went beyond looks. Like how she had these dimples whenever she grinned. And when she said something self-effacing, she’d shrug her shoulders a little and tilt her head and glance at her feet. And sometimes when her light brown eyes locked on to my dark brown ones, it was like she was reaching a hand all the way into my chest, like she was digging around in there for the most honest thing she could find. It made me want to quit hiding, even though I’d be taking the chance of her not liking what she discovered.

“The problem is,” Haley went on, “I never understood why I was doing anything—other than I knew it was expected.” She refilled both our glasses again. “And I’m not even saying my parents pushed me. Or my counselors at school. It was me. I wanted to excel. But every decision I made through high school was based on how I thought it might make me look on paper. I never once stopped to think about what I actually liked to do. That’s kind of sad, don’t you think?”