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“You’re ridiculous.” Which was pretty much the pot writing an entire post-graduate dissertation on how black the kettle was.
He very politely did not point that out.
“I could make cookies,” I offered. “So you can practice the eating-cookies part.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be tempted by the sugar.”
My face prickled. “I’m sure a cookie or two…or ten…wouldn’t set off my anxiety.”
He gazed at me a moment. “You having a hard time?” he asked—so fuckinggenuinely. Like he cared about the answer.
I shrugged, suddenly interested in the sugar packets again. They were too soggy to properly play with. “It’s just weird, being back.”
“Is this place as bad as you remembered?”
I glanced at him, a little startled. “Not…all the time.” Not now. “I just…wanted the girls to grow up in the city. Where they’d have options.”
“We have five different Christmas stores here. You saying we don’t have options?”
I tried to smile.
“Well,” he said, “I’m sure if it gets to be too much for you, you’ll take off and head someplace else.”
I heard it as an accusation, though he probably didn’t mean it to be. Or, fuck, maybe he did.
“Maybe.” I suddenly felt queasy. “I guess I should get going,” I said, even though I didn’t really have to go anywhere, and I actually wanted to stay here staring at Cass. It just seemed like we’d finally reached a moment where I wasn’t dropping something or spilling something or posing weird or behaving like a twelve-year-old. Cass was coming over to my house next Saturday. To myhouse. I wanted to quit while I was ahead.
He stood with me. “I’ll walk you out.”
Always the gentleman.
We walked to the parking lot together, and I remembered when Cass had first gotten his license. He was three months older than me, and his parents had already bought him a car, so he could drive us to the local diner. Our curfew had been eleven on school nights, midnight on weekends, but I remembered so many nights where we lost track of time and lingered over one last coffee. Or else drove to my neighborhood and parked the car two houses down from mine and did the making out version of “No, you hang up”—each of us leaning in for just one more kiss, both of us smiling, snickering against each other’s lips. When I went inside, I never heard a word of Mom’s lectures. Too busy on Cloud Nine.
He saw me to my car and stood with his hands firmly in his pockets. He only removed them to do that double knock thing on the roof of the car once I was leaving. I’d never understood what that meant. Good luck? Safe travels? Hope you don’t hit a deer?
I’d liked it more two decades ago when he’d kissed me goodbye.
* * *
I drove to Mom’s after the coffee shop, and tried unsuccessfully to get the image of Ms. Cummings pegging Cass out of my mind. Which was impossible, obviously, because it was both hilarious and incredibly disturbing. In my mind, it happened in our old classroom, and Ms. Cummings used one of those long folding rulers, and when it was over our principal’s voice crackled over the intercom and praised her for a job well done. The problem with that crazy scenario—apart from it existing to begin with—was that I’d spent so long telling myself that nothing ever changed in Christmas Valley, including the residents, that my brain couldn’t seem to grasp that Cass was as near to forty as I was, and Ms. Cummings hadn’t taught him geometry in close to twenty years. Moving back to Christmas Valley had set me on a collision course with my teenage self, but everyone else here had left theirs behind years ago.
When I got to Mom’s, her boyfriend, Jake, was in the front yard, up a ladder hanging lights or something. Whatever it was, he looked like he knew what he was doing.
“Hello, Frances,” he said, climbing down the ladder as I approached the front door. He stuck out a beefy hand, and I shook it. We shook hands every time, as though each meeting was our first. Since there was a good chance the next step was hugging, I was okay being stuck in this holding pattern for a while. “Beautiful day.”
He gazed up at the low gray clouds with a beatific smile on his face.
“I guess.” I tugged my scarf tighter and sidestepped him, opening the front door and failing to catch Pebbles, who launched herself outside like a tiny, hairy ballistic missile.
Jake scooped her up with a hearty laugh, and Mom bustled outside. “Fran! You’re back so soon.”
Yes, I’d reached my awkward quota for the day, thanks. Also my ‘discovering my former high school geometry teacher knows how to wield a strap-on’ quota. Well, anal fissures notwithstanding.
“Hi, Mom.” I slunk past her into the house, while she hurried over to Jake to collect Pebbles, and then she and Jake got into a discussion about the exact placement of the lights, and the line between “too much” and wanting it to look more festive than the Fergusons’ house across the street.
The girls were in the living room, lying on their stomachs with their coloring books open, crayons and pencils strewn across the floor. I got that familiar warm pang, knowing that for all the times the world didn’t make any sense, and for every day that life threw some new bullshit at me—I’d been feeling that one a lot lately—it didn’t even matter. As long as I had the girls, we would all be okay.
I stepped over them and flopped down on Mom’s couch.
