Weather Girl(9)

Torrance and Seth getting along: maybe this really is the most wonderful time of the year.

She’s clearly in a good mood tonight. I’d love to catch her alone, have a real conversation. I vow to do it as soon as she’s free.

“With dinner winding down—yes, let’s give it up for the Hilton catering staff!” Seth breaks for applause. “With dinner winding down, we wanted to get started on what’s always been our favorite KSEA tradition. You know what that means . . . it’s time for our annual white elephant gift exchange!”

Our tables are arranged in a semicircle around the ballroom’s largest tree, and with more than sixty people in attendance, there’s a significant stack of boxes beneath it. I brought a cheese board shaped like Washington state I found at a boutique near my apartment.

“Please don’t bring home anything embarrassing,” Hannah says to Nate.

“I’m offended. You know you’ve used last year’s Ove Glove as much as I have, if not more.”

Our places at the table had numbers when we arrived that designated our order in the game. Hannah winds up going first, unwrapping a trio of scented candles. Reporter Bethany Choi goes next, picking an oddly shaped package that turns out to be a tiny USB-powered vacuum.

Then it’s Seth’s turn. He bypasses Hannah’s and Bethany’s gifts for something new, and I have never seen a grown man’s face light up the way his does when he pulls out a breakfast sandwich maker. “No way,” he says, holding it like I imagine a parent holds their newborn baby for the first time. “This can do an English muffin, egg, and ham all at the same time?”

“And cheese,” offers up Chris Torres. “I have one of those. It’s a game changer.”

“I do love breakfast sandwiches.” Seth tucks it under his arm and heads back to his seat. “If anyone comes for this, I hope they’re ready to forgo their next raise. Kidding, of course.”

“I don’t think he’s kidding,” I whisper to Hannah.

“Funny you’re so enamored with that,” Torrance says in a tone that suggests it isn’t funny at all. “Because as I recall, I bought you something very similar—some might even say identical—for Christmas one year.”

“Yeah. You did. And you took it in the divorce,” Seth says calmly.

From a table away, I catch Russell’s eye, and I don’t miss the twitch to his jaw.

We make it through the next few players without incident, and then it’s my turn. I pick a craft cocktail kit that gets stolen in the next round. That makes it my turn again, and that’s when I see the opportunity.

Torrance is still sulking while Seth reads the sandwich maker box, making a big show of it. The game had a fifty-dollar limit, so it’s not as if it’s something he couldn’t have bought for himself, but I can tell it’s the principle of the thing. And if I want Torrance to like me, or at the very least to respect me—I’m a realist, I know I can’t have both—I have to do something to earn it. Clearly, that something hasn’t happened during work hours yet. At the station, I either disappear or distract, though it usually ends up being the former. Tonight, maybe I can smooth some of the friction between them.

“I’ll take the breakfast sandwich maker?” I say. It comes out like a question.

Both Seth’s and Torrance’s heads whip toward me. There’s this unspoken rule in white elephant: you don’t steal from your boss.

“You don’t want this, Ari,” Seth says. “It’s a piece of junk. It’ll probably break the first time I use it.”

“She can make up her own damn mind, Seth.” Torrance is not doing a great job suppressing her glee. She might be seconds away from leaping across the circle to yank the gift from Seth’s grasp. “If she wants the breakfast sandwich maker, she should take it. It looks like it can make mini pizzas, too?”

“Yeah.” Seth crosses his arms, biceps straining against the suit fabric. “It can.”

Suddenly I’m no longer sure if I want to get in the middle of some Torrance-and-Seth pettiness. I glance around the circle, most people averting their eyes. I didn’t know a party game could be this fraught. But of course, this is what the Hales do. The Hales are why we can’t have nice things. They turn anything, even a simple game at a holiday party that is a Christmas party with one sad menorah ornament, into a standoff.

“I—I can take something else,” I say. “I’ll steal something, or I’ll pick a new gift, or—”

But Seth’s already stepping forward and handing it over, and that is how I learn it’s possible to feel both triumphant and like a total piece of shit at the same time.

He picks another gift, one with penguin-patterned wrapping paper. “A set of reusable straws. Cool,” he says, with all the excitement of a kid who’s gotten socks for their birthday.

“Great!” Torrance’s smile gleams brighter than it does on TV. “Who’s next?”



* * *



? ? ?

    THE PARTY DRAGS on, dessert and dancing and people laughing over their white elephant gifts. Fleetingly, I wonder why Garrison couldn’t have waited to dump me until after New Year’s. Then at least we wouldn’t have had to suffer through these parties alone. Though he’s probably having a blast at his investment firm’s annual yacht party.