Page 16 of Ghost of Ex-mas Past
Indeed I do. Yvette and Lance are in charge of food this morning, and there’s yogurt and granola fixings out on the counter. Everyone’s downstairs in various stages of breakfast, including Charlie, whose hair Mom ruffles as she passes.
It gives me a pang in my chest. Charlie’s sitting next to my dad and they’re engaged in deep conversation about 401(k)s, I think?
Mom and Dad always treated Charlie like one of their own and when we broke up, it hurt them too. Susan and Gary had been their best friends ever since they’d moved in next door to us in Mobile. They’d watched each other’s kids, swapped parenting advice, and, when we were old enough to take care of ourselves, went on double dates.
The first October after Charlie and I had broken up, my parents had come to me asking if I wanted to do something different for Christmas. It meant so much to me that they would offer, but at that point I had just moved to New York and had enough change in my life. While it was occasionally awkward, I look back now and can see that all four parents had run interference, distracting us with different activities just to make it through the holidays without a meltdown. And it had worked.
I don’t enjoy being around Charlie, but I do it for my parents.
“Morning, Lance,” I say, plopping down next to him at the dining room table.
He gives me a small smile. “Good morning.” Lance and Yvette met during their flight attendant training and after a year of commuting to see each other, Lance moved to Chicago to live with her and proposed in June. I like Lance—he’s quiet but steady, and tolerates Yvette’s pessimism with a grace that I can’t manage most of the time, which is what probably makes him a good flight attendant too.
We chat—one-sidedly, but still—over our breakfast until Dad clinks his empty coffee mug with a spoon to get everyone’s attention. “All right, team. As much as I love a lazy morning”—I check my watch; it’s ten thirty already—“this to-do list isn’t going to tackle itself.” Dad holds up a stack of notebook papers with Mom’s small, tidy writing on it. “Now, who wants to pick up the food?”
We split up tasks and divide and conquer. I spend the whole day making trips to the grocery store with my mom and Gary. Jasper joins us for the first one but then we leave him at the rental to bake cookies and banana bread, his wife as his assistant, while we make a second run. Then we have to do a third run because my spoiled-chef brother-in-law tells us we bought the wrong type of flour and not enough butter, and we comply because somehow in the two years that Jasper has been in our family, his pain au chocolat has become a tradition and it won’t be the holidays without it.
Honestly, I’d forgotten how exhausting it is to haul groceries. In the city, I live two blocks away from a market andifI need groceries, I pick them up on my way home from work. More often than not, I order out or Brin brings home food from work. I also can’t find the yogurt I like or the coconut sugar I normally put in my coffee.
Moving to a small town would take some acclimating. Who knew the city was spoiling me?
I don’t see Charlie all day, and when Jasper banishes me and my sisters from the kitchen so he can make fried chicken in peace, we watchElfin the basement. There are new decorations in the house, though; paper snowflakes that hang from the tops of the windows and a yule altar in the living room next to the fireplace, which all have the distinct stamp of Susan on them, with Charlie’s help, probably.
At dinner, Charlie and I sit at opposite ends of the table. There’s not a lot of talking because Jasper makes his fried chicken with buttermilk and Cajun seasoning and it’s become one of our family’s favorite dishes.
Afterward, though, while we’re sitting around finishing our wine and barely making a dent in the cheesecake we bought at the store, Yvette disappears from the table and returns with a handful of envelopes in her hand, plus four gift bags, one black and three purple. She stands next to Lance and clears her throat. He rises and puts his arm around her waist.
“So,” Yvette begins, a huge grin on her face. “We’ve picked a date.”
My dad whoops and the rest of us laugh. Yvette passes out the envelopes. “We know it’s soon,” she says. “But no one had any conflicts when I asked about your schedules so...”
She hands me an envelope that says:
Beatrice Cummings and Guest
I hold back a snort. And who, exactly, would I be bringing?
I tear open the envelope and read the card.
Susan gasps. “Oh, it’s at Magnolia Meadows! I love that place.”
That’s a small farm outside Mobile. I quickly scan the card. April 27, a Sunday wedding. Four months away.
“There’s one other thing,” my sister continues, and then she nudges her fiancé, who blushes, and hands him the black gift bag.
Lance walks around the table and sets it in front of Jasper. Jasper’s eyes widen and he looks at the bag in confusion.
“Open it,” Lance says.
Jasper dives in, pulling out tissue and a black box, which he sets on the table and opens. His eyes dart back and forth, reading, and then they widen even further. “What?” He jumps up from the table. “Really?”
Lance laughs and nods, and Jasper wraps him in a big hug, lifting him off the floor and swinging him around. Mom leans over to look in the box and coos. She lifts it to show the rest of us: there’s a flask, a bow tie, and cuff links, with a card that says,Will you be my groomsman?
Lance’s feet are back on the floor now, though he and Jasper are still hugging, but now it’s the back-slapping, quietly happy kind, instead of Jasper’s unbridled exuberance.
“So, now that the cat’s out of thebag,” Yvette jokes, and places the three remaining bags in front of me, Naomi, and Kayla. Inside are more flasks, earrings, and a set of crystal hairpins with the card.
There’s more squealing and smiles and laughter. The four of us hug, and I catch Susan wiping her eyes and Mom and Dad hugging.
