Page 47 of Karma Kitty Christmas
“Yeah—it’s gorgeous. A new throw rug, a new comforter, those lamps—and the picture! It’s so beautiful!” Isaac had managed to find a local artist who’d done a painting of the bridge in downtown Sacramento during the sunset. Between the gold of the bridge, the orange and blue of the sky, and the darkness of the river below it, the landscape was a study in contrast. It was bold and colorful without being tacky, and Isaac adored it.
Luca hadn’t stopped praising it since they’d put it up, sliding Todd’s painting, unlamented, into the same corner of the garage where Isaac was planning to put the living room furniture next year, when he had enough money to replace it.
Closing his eyes, he could remember Luca’s fingertips along his bare shoulder as he’d said the words, before they’d fallen into bed again, making exuberant love in a room that felt liketheirs, their sanctuary, their place.
“Thanks,” he said, giving a small smile. “Roxy, this has been the best summer I’ve had since… since….” Oh God. “Since my parents were alive.”
“Oh wow,” she said, suitably impressed. It was so easy to love Roxy—she did get it when things were important.
“Yeah,” Isaac said, finally able to actuallytalkabout the thing haunting him like the ghost of a Victorian child. “I-I don’t want it to end. I don’t want school to start and me to get all… lost. You know how we get. Lost and tired and cranky and… and miserable.”
“We get over it,” Roxy supplied helpfully, and then, in the name of honesty, she added, “Most of us.”
Isaac grimaced. Teachers got divorced a lot. Some of it was just thatgrown-upsgot divorced a lot, but some of it was—and Isaac had seen this firsthand, in himself—that the habit of being a petty tyrant in your own domain didn’t always leave a person when they left the classroom. Isaac heard it in his voice when he lectured Luca about which plasticware container to put stuff in, or why they should buy the bundles of cilantro and not the live herbs, until Isaac got his shit together and made an herb box.
Once in a while could be forgiven—even Todd had looked upon it with a certain grim tolerance when they’d first started dating. But Isaac had seen Paula Lamphere lecture the guy coming to fix the lights in her room with the same ball-shriveling don’t-fuck-with-me tone she used on her students, and he’d known immediately why she was still single.
Roxy had once admitted, in a moment of absolute delirious sleep deprivation, to telling her husband how to push out his bowel movement while he was in the bathroom and she was walking an infant up and down the hallway.
The thought of inflicting that sort of cruelty on Luca—hisLuca, who gazed at him with absolute reverence in the moonlight through his window—filled him with a deep sadness. And not a little fear.
“Todd and I….” He paused but then realized how much less he’d been saying that in the last month. “Todd and I didn’t start out bad,” he said after a moment. “When I was young and… and sad, he was strong and solid and dependable. I learned so much from him about how caring for someone isn’t just words or putting out, you know?”
“It’s being there,” Roxy said, and she gave a small smile. “In the middle of the night, covered in baby puke, the guy who stepsin to change the diaper and give you a towel and tell you to take a shower—that’s your guy.”
Isaac nodded. “Same, but without the diaper—or the baby.”
“You met Todd during your party days, right?”
“God, I was so high.” Isaac shook his head. “I don’t even remembermeetinghim. I just remember waking up at his old apartment thinking, ‘My God, I’ve seen more exciting hotel rooms.’” He sighed. “And then Todd brought me breakfast and ibuprofen for my hangover and told me my clothes would be out of the dryer in a few if I wanted to shower.” He shook his head. “I mean, it was like my parents’ house, except I’d obviously gotten laid the night before. Whywouldn’tI want to stay?”
She chuckled like she was supposed to. “But Isaac,” she said when she was done, “you’re a grown-up now. And the good kind of grown-up. You’ve got your own cat.” She petted Euclid, who had jumped up on her lap while they’d been talking. “And I gotta tell you, the cat distribution system knew what it was doing with this one.Youmay have been clean and sober for years, but your cat is the best kind of stoner.”
“He’s so baked,” Isaac said fondly, knowing that right now the cat was stoned on sunshine, because they only broke out the catnip every so often. It didn’t stop the furry orange thing from drooling on Roxy’s lap, though, did it?
Roxy fondled his battered ears and then resumed speaking. “But what I’m saying is that you’re… you’re not that kid anymore. You sustained a long-term relationship, and it may not have been great for the last few years, but you worked hard to make it work. You know what teaching does to you. You can prepthemfor it—” She paused. “If you make one joke about stretching the rim, I’m throwing your cat at you.”
It took a minute before Isaac got it, and by then he was sipping bright pink pomegranate lemonade.
He almost sprayed it all over his blanket, and he held his hand in front of his mouth in outrage.
“You bitch,” he rasped when he was done coughing. “If I had gotten pomegranate lemonade all over this goddamned blanket, I would have strangled you with it and told Brian I got the kids for my suffering. FuckingJesus!”
Roxy was collapsed against the back of the couch, the bombproof cat actually collapsed on his side on her lap, and she had the bright pink juice all over her white shirt.
“Worth it!” she gasped. “So worth it!”
It took them a while to regain their composure, but eventually Roxy was leaning sideways on the couch, her T-shirt blotchy but dry, resting her head on the arm of it, and Isaac had picked his blanket back up and was working quietly. He suspected Roxy was about to fall into her own nap, and he prepared himself to go get the kids at the first whimper, but given that poor little Sparrow Anne was still asleep on the floor after their terrible crack-up, he rather suspected everybody else was down for a long time.
“Isaac,” Roxy murmured, “my terrible dirty joke aside, warn them, okay? Tell them what it’s like so they know. It’s like Brian—he makes sure he gets all caught up during the summer so he can pick up the slack when I go back to work. And then we sneak a week of vacation before Christmas.”
Which beat the hell out of traveling in this heat in August; neither of them had to say it.
“Do you really want a basketball team?” he asked, wondering if she’d hear him before she dropped off.
“Yeah,” she mumbled. “But I might have to go to part-time with four. I’ll try to warn you.”
He waited for a bit, humming to himself, and then he pulled out his phone and set it on a quiet music-streaming list. Notclassical, just not “bouncy, with shouting” as the movie quote went.
