Page 96 of Devil in Disguise
Annabelle said, “I don’t … anything’s fine, really. I don’t really have any. Traditions. Decorations. Whatever.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Jennifer said. “Now you do, because this year, we’re starting our own, all together. We’re afamily.And can I hug you?”
She did, and Annabelle didn’t cry. She also didn’t hug back that much. Like she was afraid that, if she let go and felt everything inside, all the pieces of her that she’d been holding together would fly apart and shatter.
Dyma was never going to be her mom, and she couldn’t think of a beautiful thing to say. Instead, she said, “You know what I’ve been wanting to do, what I was thinking about all morning?”
“No,” her mom said. “What?”
“Make gingerbread cookies.” She told Annabelle, “My grandma and I made them every year, and frosted them with white frosting and those little silver balls so they looked like snowflakes. Although seriously, she told me later on that it was really just that she didn’t want to bother with doing all those colors and those fiddly cookie-cutter shapes, so she figured she’d just call them snowflakes and make it easy. With this big laugh.Totallymy grandma. She’d drink wine while we did it, too. She called it ‘Christmas juice.’ I was thinking how sad I was last year not to be able to do it with her, but then I thought—hey, you and I can do it instead, and Nick can sit in his little seat and supervise until he’s big enough to stand on the stool and help. I don’t have the cool grandma anymore, but we could be the cool sisters, right? Well, you’re the aunt, but more or less the cool sisters. It’s just not fun if you do it alone. So—would you?”
“Yeah,” Annabelle said. “Sure.” And smiled.
“Cool,” Dyma said. “So—grocery store on the way home. And, Mom? Annabelle’s off for two weeks, and I’m off forthreeweeks. You don’t have to worry about your to-do list or whatever, because we’ve got it. It’s Christmas. We’ll hang out. We’ll help you with Nick. It’ll be fun.”
41
Family Time
Dyma didplenty of things over the next five days. Family things. She made those gingerbread cookies with Annabelle, and went for a walk in the Forest Park with Owen, Nick, and the jogging stroller on Owen’s day off on Tuesday, since it wasn’t raining. She said, “I shouldn’t be making you work today, though,” and he looked at her with all kinds of humor in his eyes and said, “I’m not working. I’m walking.”
And when a woman stopped to admire Nick and said, “You look so proud of him,” and it was awkward? All he said was, “Babies are pretty special, yeah, and he’s a good one.”
“There’s nothing like family time at Christmas,” the woman said. “I miss mine being that age. Of course, I’ve forgotten all the hard parts. The sweetness, though, how they cry when you take them out of the bathtub, then stop crying when you dry them off, the look of them in that hooded towel, the way they snuggle into you and fall asleep afterwards … you always remember that, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Owen said. “You sure do.”
She moved on at last, and Dyma asked Owen, “Why didn’t you correct her?”
“It would’ve made her feel bad. Why should I do that? She just wanted to think about babies for a minute.”
“You know,” she said, “you’re a really nice person.”
He laughed. “Don’t tell anyone. Not exactly the reputation a center wants, going into the postseason.”
So, yeah, they did that. She and Annabelle did last-minute Christmas shopping, too, which turned out to be an extremely difficult thing to do for people who could buy themselves anything they wanted, but she did her best anyway. Owen had dinner with them every night, and then he took Dyma home with him and brought her back for breakfast, and waking up with Owen was just about the best thing in the world. She said on the morning of Christmas Eve, when they woke up to a shimmering gilding of ice on every tree branch, as she sipped the coffee he’d brought her and looked out at a silver world, “This is too easy to get used to, being with you.”
“Yeah,” he said, and that was all.
“If you win this week,” she said, “you don’t have to play the wild card game, right? So you can stay home.”
“Not good to look that far ahead.”
“What, four days? That’s too far ahead?”
“One game at a time isn’t just a cliché. It’s a mindset.”
They were quiet, and she wondered when the Tao had started to become so much harder to follow.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it.She believed it. She did. But she wanted to hold it anyway. She wanted to look further ahead than four days. She wanted toknow.
Picking up her great-grandpa at the airport on Christmas Eve, and the next day, once Harlan and Owen were home from practice, Christmas presents and Christmas dinner. Playing a round-robin ping-pong tournament that evening that ended up, as anybody could have foreseen, in a duel between Harlan and Owen that went right down to the wire.
The score was nine to ten in the final game with Harlan ahead, the ball a blur of motion, their paddles flashing as they hit the ball with acrack.Shots aimed into the far corners of the table or barely grazing the net, and both men lunging, arms sweeping, smacking the ball so hard you’d think they’d crush it. Owen finally hitting a spinning shot that Harlan caught and returned, but that missed the edge of the table by a fraction of an inch.
Point to Owen.
Ten to ten. Harlan’s serve now, and Owen standing, solid but poised to move, every bit of his concentration focused right here. Harlan saying, “You realize it’s my house. Gotta win in my house. Got my baby here, too. Don’t want to humiliate a man in front of his baby.” And Owen saying, “Too bad you’re old, then. Come on, Thor. Bring it.” And the whole thing starting all over again. Harlan’s T-shirt starting to get a little damp, both of them breathing hard. Owen with his otherworldly wingspan, able to cover almost the entire table without even moving his feet, and Harlan with his impossible speed.
