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“So, if my mom and dad come over on New Year’s Eve, you’re going to behave yourself?” Oliver asked him.

“I’ll apologize. I am sorry,” he admitted. “I’m sorry for being a jerk. I didn’t really mean most of it.”

“You know that Dad can’t roll with teasing and arguing,” his grandson said. “He gets sensitive about stuff.”

“He always has. He hoards insults and slights the same way as he used to hide gum in his room when he was a kid,” Gramps agreed. “But I loved him more than anything back then and I love him the same way now. I had a great time on my vacation but I missed everybody, too. You’re right that we shouldn’t be apart.” He glanced at me. “Are you sniffling?”

“Yes,” I answered. “It’s nice that you’re all going to make up.”

“If my son is willing,” Gramps said.

“I wish my family would act like yours,” I told them.

“Kat, we Marchands have personality differences and problematic language,” Oliver said, glancing at his grandfather. “The issues in your own family run a little deeper.”

Gramps jumped to my defense. “Don’t make her feel bad! It’s not her fault.”

“I know that. She was born into it,” he answered calmly before turning back to me. “What I’m trying to say is that it’s not your responsibility to fix issues that are so longstanding and so…nuts. Those people really seem nuts.”

He wasn’t wrong. After working more on my email draft, I had sent it to my grandparents and to several of the people who worked for them, contacts listed on their artworks website. Maybe my mom would have had better ways of connecting, because my method didn’t get anywhere. I’d had no response from anybody, not even when I’d sent a second email and honestly, I had turned a little threatening. I had mentioned things like “difficult and disagreeable disclosures” and “possible prison punishments.” I tried not to be alliterative, but it just came out.

That still hadn’t stirred them to answer but I was happy that things might get better with Oliver’s family. A few days later, on New Year’s Eve, I carefully zipped up the dress that I had already discussed with Vera and I secured the necklace that she had told me would be perfect with it, one from her collection. I looked at myself in the mirror of Oliver’s bathroom and thought that I looked pretty nice…I swiveled and eyed myself from behind. Yes, this view was also good. But I wasn’t ever going to be as curvy as Lexi, his ex, not unless I took apart the bed pillows and put all that stuffing to a different use.

“Wow,” Oliver said when I went downstairs. “Is it rude if I whistle?”

“Please go ahead,” I encouraged, so he did. “I don’t usually dress up so much.”

“I’ve never seen you like this,” he agreed. “I like it.” He was fancier too, in a dress shirt that he rarely pulled out and a tie. “I knew you were planning something when you talked about going to see Vera to ask for her fashion advice, so I thought I’d better step up,” he answered when I mentioned his attire.

“You did.” I also tried to whistle but it didn’t sound half as enticing as when he’d done it. “What’s left for us to finish?”

We both got to work on the dinner that we’d been prepping throughout the day, which was fun because his kitchen was spacious and he’d had a lot of good cooking tools in the boxes that he had left sealed after his move home from California. Also, I thought that we worked well together. He was a patient person who didn’t get annoyed when I did things like pause to look up the exact definition of “minced,” because I thought that maybe my tiny pieces of onion were too large. He was also fun to talk to at any time, cooking or even when we were running together. We were doing that now in his neighborhood and it was cold and hard, but I still liked being with him.

The doorbell rang. “That’ll be Gramps,” he said, glancing at the clock on the oven. “It’s quarter till, so he’s right on time for our six o’clock invitation.”

It was him and he had brought several bottles of champagne. “I know that I’m driving home, so I’ll have half a glass only,” he told me, heading off any conversation about BAC. “You look very nice tonight. I always liked that necklace.”

“Thank you. You look nice, too.” He had also dressed up for the evening, in a suit and even a tie which he fiddled with several times.

“You don’t have to be nervous,” I encouraged and he told me that he wasn’t. Then he fiddled with the tie again.

Not too long after his arrival, another car stopped at the curb and it was Oliver’s parents. I hovered a little, worried about their reintroduction to each other, but they acted normally. Oliver’s dad offered his hand to shake but Gramps hugged him instead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was an asshole. I’m very sorry.”

Things weren’t totally smooth sailing, however. I could tell that Gramps was doing his best to self-regulate and he was mostly succeeding, but it also seemed like his son was on high alert for any insult or provocation. It made things a little tense over dinner and by the time that Oliver was using his frother to prepare coffee, I was trying not to yawn in their faces. The anxiety had worn me down.

“I think that this is going well,” I said, putting my fist over my mouth to cover the yawn as I entered the kitchen. My tiredness also could have been due to drinking a lot of that champagne—it was tasty, I was thirsty, and this was New Year’s Eve. Weren’t you supposed to have too many glasses as long as you weren’t getting behind the wheel?

“I feel like I’m walking a tightrope. I don’t want to be their referee,” he answered, looking towards the living room, where they’d all moved. “I don’t hear any doors slamming or cars starting outside, so I guess they’re ok without my presence.”

“I think that things will get easier the more this happens,” I said. “They’ll get used to each other again. That’s what I always wanted for myself when I was a kid, that people would get used to me.”

He turned off the frother. “What does that mean?”

“I thought I could grow on them. That was my hope,” I explained. “I thought that it didn’t work because we always moved away too quickly.”

“You got to know people when you were at school, though.”

I handed him the mugs, nodding. Boarding school was when I had realized that I didn’t grow on people. Or, if I did, I was more like a fungus which they’d want to treat with medication to remove.