In A Holidaze(63)
“I do.” I want to crawl out of my skin and then dive into the snow outside.
“Listen up,” she says, “because I’m going to tell you a secret not everyone knows: Everything is going to be okay. I mean it. I realize everyone around you being messy might make you feel like you can’t ever be, but that isn’t true. It’s okay to be messy sometimes, honey.”
When I wrap my arms around her waist and tuck my head under her chin, I feel rooted here for the first time in more days than I can count.
? ? ?
Andrew isn’t around for the rest of the afternoon when we’re ready to start sorting and opening presents, so we bake. A lot. Peppermint meltaways, Mexican wedding cakes, gingerbread, Santa’s Whiskers—the same cookies we’ve made every year I can remember. With a plate stacked for Santa and the sky growing dark, we start setting the table.
The candlesticks we use belonged to Aaron’s mom and serve as a reminder of how this whole thing started. I set the flowers in the center and the wine bottles are evenly spaced along the length of the table. The twins decorate those—and Miso, and each other—with a bag of bows they find in the living room.
Andrew slides unobtrusively into the kitchen just as the rest of the dishes are being brought out, and he chooses a seat as far away from me as he possibly could, in the distant corner, where Aaron usually sits.
I’m sure the food is delicious—it’s my favorite meal all year and smells like heaven—but I can’t taste a thing. I chew absently, and swallow, trying to look like I’m following the flow of conversation. I feel like I have a frozen block of ice in my stomach. Andrew won’t even look at me, and I’m so miserable, I’m not sure how I’m still here, at the dining room table, and not back in seat 19B. Maybe I haven’t finished thoroughly ruining everything yet, and the universe is waiting for me to really go all in. I pick up my wineglass, full almost to the brim. I’m sure I won’t disappoint.
“We thought we’d wait to open presents until you got home,” Ricky tells Andrew.
Andrew chews and swallows a bite quickly, guilt coloring his cheeks. “Thank you. Sorry. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course, baby,” Lisa says. “We wanted to be all together.”
The twins have been so patient all day, and with the prospect of gift opening finally spoken, it’s like a switch has been flipped. Kennedy and Zachary explode in excitement and noise. I remember that feeling, remember wanting to rush through the meal so that we could tear into our gifts, and then afterward always being so grateful that we paced ourselves, otherwise the day would go by too fast. But this time, I want to skip it all and head to the basement. I want to climb into bed and succumb to blackness. It’s dramatic, but I wonder how terrible it would be to disappear once everyone is asleep and simply fly home to Berkeley early and have a quiet Christmas Day alone tomorrow. Maybe my scarf will get caught in the escalator at the airport, and I’ll wind up back at the start again. And would that be so bad? Honestly it doesn’t sound any worse than what’s happening now.
After cleaning up, we slowly make our way into the living room. All around me, my loved ones chatter happily about their excitement for their Secret Santa recipient to open their gift. Mom brings in an enormous platter of cookies, and Ricky follows with a pitcher of milk and some glasses stacked on a tray. Cocktails are poured, music is put on, the fire roars. It is everything I love in life, but I can’t enjoy it. What a good life lesson: be careful what you wish for. I wanted to undo the damage done with Theo, but that was intro level life-ruining. What happened with Andrew feels like getting a PhD in idiocy.
? ? ?
Across the room, Andrew sits in a chair, staring quietly into the fire, so different from his usual chatty self. I wonder where he was all day, what he was doing. How he can look so sad after the end of a two-day-old relationship. I’m mourning something I wanted for half my life. What’s his excuse?
Maybe he’s deciding how to tell everyone that he won’t be back next year—if we ever actually get around to next year—which, frankly, is exactly what I deserve.
When I turn back to the room, I see Kyle wearing a Santa hat, which means it’s his turn to choose the first gift to be opened. Although we each draw a name, the idea that each person will get only one gift from one other person is sort of a joke. The pile under the tree is mammoth. Gifts from parents to children, from children to parents, little things that we see throughout the year and have to buy for each other. Kyle gets random things with tacos on them. Aaron loves cool socks. Dad gets a lot of joke gifts—Whoopee Cushions, gum disguised as Juicy Fruit that tastes like skunk, handshake buzzers. He loves to play pranks on his office staff, and somewhere along the line we all agreed to be in on it. The pile of gifts under the tree is a hilarious display of adoration, capitalism at work, and our complete inability to moderate ourselves in any way.
When Kyle brings me a small box, and I look at the tag and see Andrew’s name in the From line, I feel like I’ve swallowed a basketball. This didn’t happen the first time around. I know enough has changed in this version of reality that it might not mean something. It could be something benign he bought on a random trip to the 7-Eleven. It could be a box of Snickers—my favorite candy bar—or a can of Clamato, a literal gag gift.
But the tiny groan he lets out—like he forgot it was there and wants to somehow take it back, undo it—tells me this isn’t a joke gift. It’s tender.