Page 219

His hands close at his side, and he hates it so much that he’s visibly bothered? I don’t know what to think. I’ve had people disagree with me my whole life. I’ve had people tell me no, but I’ve never had somebody disagree with me and let me keep the thing we were disagreeing about.

“Will you drive me?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says.

We go downstairs. His mom is at the stove with her back to us, and I tell her we’re going out for an hour, and she turns around with a wooden spoon in her hand and looks at the two of us, at my face, at Rafe’s jaw. She doesn’t ask where. She just looks at us a second longer than she needs to, and then she says, “Dinner’s at six,” and goes back to the pot.

Rafe doesn’t say anything on the drive.

He already said it. Now he’s done, and I can feel him hating every second of this. His hands are at ten and two on the wheel, tight enough that the leather creaks. He checks his mirrors more than he needs to. When we reach the road toward town, he drives exactly the speed limit, which he never does, like if he goes any faster he’ll get there before he’s ready.

He doesn’t tell me again that it’s a bad idea. It’s sitting in the car with us in the space between the seats.

I have the gift in my lap. It’s not much. It isn’t anything. I unwrapped it in my dorm room in December to check the lid and wrapped it back up again so carefully that the tape barely shows. Under the brown paper, it’s a cookie tin. Round, red, with a ring of holly painted around the lid, the green gone soft and the red berries faded almost to pink. A dent on one side. A little rust at the seam on the bottom. Three dollars and fifty cents. I saw it from the other end of the aisle and had to get it.

When I was fourteen, the first Christmas I spent at my grandma’s, she had one just like it. Same holly. Same red. She kept it on top of the refrigerator every December, full of sugar cookies with colored sprinkles that she made from a recipe on an index card so old the ink had gone brown. You weren’t supposed to have any until Christmas Eve. I used to drag a kitchen chair when she was in the other room and climb up, take one, and put the lid back exactly the way it was, and put the chair back exactly where it was, and I thought I was a genius.

She kept it the whole time I lived there. It went from cookies to buttons to the bills she didn’t want to look at, and then the bottom rusted through, the winter I was seventeen, and she threw it out.

I stood in the aisle of the Goodwill with this one in my hands for a long time.

It isn’t worth anything. I know that. I checked out of habit before I could stop myself. Nobody would pay more than five dollars for it on a good day. It’s basically decorative trash.

I turn it over in my lap. The paper crinkles.

Rafe looks at it, then back at the road.

We turn right on Kessler. The houses are smaller and closer together, chain-link and porch lights, a plastic snowman tipped over in somebody’s yard.

The gray sedan is in front of my grandma’s house half on the curb with the garbage bag still taped over the back window.

He pulls up behind it and puts the car in park and doesn’t turn it off.

“I’m coming in,” he says.

“No.”

He turns and looks at me.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “Tess. His car is right there.”

“I can handle it.”

His eyes are dark, and his throat bobs. He’s quiet. His jaw is working so hard I can see the muscle jumping under the skin.

“Stay in the car,” I say.

“Tess.”

“Please, Rafe. It’s Christmas,” I plead. I can hear it in my voice, and I hate that he’s making it a thing.

He looks at the house and at the gray sedan. His eyes find mine for a moment.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll wait in the car.”

“Thank you.” I get out with the tin.

The front door opens when I’m halfway up the walk, and Dylan comes out onto the steps in a hoodie and socks with a cigarette and stops. He looks me up and down, then past me at the car.