Page 43 of Thin Ice

"And Danny?"

"Danny's Danny. Working. He's got a renovation job out past Greenfield that's been going since October."

"Does Danny know?" I said. "About me."

She paused. Put a bag of flour in the cart slowly.

"I don't know what Danny knows. Sheryl might've told him. He's thirty years old, and he's been through enough of his own stuff that he won't make yours into a thing."

We hit the checkout. She handed me the coupon wallet. "There's a dollar fifty off the second ham in there somewhere, the blue one." I found it and handed it to the cashier, and the total came to sixty-eight dollars, and she paid in cash from the jar, and we loaded the bags into the trunk in the cold.

She slammed the trunk and looked at me across the car roof.

"Alright," she said. "Gift time."

***

Gift time was a disaster.

We drove to Art-Mart. The old warehouse past the fire station, which runs as an indoor flea market year-round. Fifty-some stalls under one roof: local vendors selling candles and soaps and jewelry, a guy who makes cutting boards out of reclaimed barn wood, a woman with hand-knit everything, a vintage booth stuffed with records and old signs, a stall that's just hot sauce. The whole place smelled like dust and the space heaters that every vendor ran under their tables.

My mom loved Art-Mart. I usually lasted about fifteen minutes before the browsing made me want to walk into traffic.

Today I lasted less.

I moved through the stalls, picking things up and putting them down. A leather journal — he owns nicer ones. A wool hat — he has a hat. A framed photo of the lake in winter — pretty, generic, the kind of thing you'd hang in a bathroom. A vintage compass that was actually cool, but the glass was cracked, and eighty dollars felt like a lot for cracked glass. Not that I had it.

My mom held up a handmade coffee mug: blue glaze, nice weight.

"What about this?"

"It's a mug."

"It's a nice mug. Handmade."

"I can't give him a mug, Mom. He grew up drinking out of china from China that probably has his family crest on it."

She put the mug down.

We kept going. Past the soap stall, past the hot sauce guy, past a table of secondhand books and a rack of vintage flannel shirts. Nothing. Everything was something he already had a better version of, or it was a thing you'd buy for someone you didn't know well enough to try harder.

"This isn't about the gift," she said, watching me put down a leather keychain for the third time.

"It's about the gift."

"It's about the fact that you think anything you can afford won't be good enough."

I didn't answer because she was right.

"Liam," She put her hand on my arm. "He cares about you."

"For now. Until — "

"Until what?"

"Until he realizes what it's really going to be like to have a poor boyfriend."

The word landed wrong the second it left my mouth. Poor. I heard it hit the air, and I heard what it actually said — not about Alex, not about me, about her. I called her life poor.