Grandma comes Christmas Eve. We do the tree. Christmas morning, we open gifts. Christmas afternoon, we go to Aunt Rachel's. Is Emmy coming?
The kitchen held its breath for approximately two seconds. That's up to Emma, Ethan said. Lily turned to Emma with the directness of someone who had already made up her own mind and was simply waiting for the formal confirmation. Do you want to come? Emma looked at Ethan's back.
He was still facing the coffee maker. Very deliberately, she noticed, not turning around, giving her room the way he always gave her room. She thought about her own Christmases for the past 3 years, her apartment, her parents over FaceTime, her brother's texts from Seattle, the particular silence of a holiday spent in the competent management of her own solitude. Fine. All of it fine.
She thought about a house that smelled like cinnamon and crayons. A child who wanted to know what her best color was. A man who turned the porch light on. "Yes," Emma said. "I want to come."
Lily nodded once, confirming the order. "Okay, you should know that we open one gift on Christmas Eve. It's a rule. Also, Grandma brings her coconut cake, which looks weird, but is actually amazing." Also, she paused as though accessing a longer list.
Daddy cries at the Christmas movie we watch every year. It's the one with the brothers. I know the one, Emma said. He pretends he doesn't, but he does. I've been watching for 6 years.
She hopped off her stool. I'm going to draw something. She disappeared toward the living room. Ethan turned around from the coffee maker. He was holding two mugs and he had the expression of a man who had been listening to every word of that exchange and was doing extremely careful work at not reacting to any of it.
I do not cry at that movie, he said. Okay, I get something in my eye every year. It's Dusty House. Emma took the mug he held out. It's a very moving film.
His mouth did the thing she loved the thing where it was not quite a smile but wanted to be and was deciding whether to commit. It's a little moving. It's extremely moving. The brothers get me. He admitted the scene at the end when the older one know the scene.
He looked at her over his coffee mug. You're going to make fun of me for the next 20 years. About this, the word 20 landed between them with the specific weight of a number that implied a very long time, and neither of them flinched from it. "Absolutely," Emma said. He drank his coffee.
She drank hers. From the living room came the sound of Lily narrating something to herself in a low, serious voice, a story she was drawing as she told it. The private creative logic of a child who had never needed an audience for the things she made for herself. Emma stood in the kitchen of the house on Maple Street and felt the afternoon settle around her like something that had been waiting a long time to arrive. The school fundraiser came on a Saturday in the second week of December, held in the gymnasium of Lily's school, organized by a committee of parents who had been planning it since October with the collective intensity of people who needed something to be in charge of.
Emma had known about it for weeks. She had not particularly dreaded it. What she hadn't fully accounted for was the specific social ecosystem of an elementary school parent community. The way it had its own history, its own established pairs and groupings, the way a new person standing beside a familiar person became a subject of interest before anyone had said a word. She felt it within 10 minutes of arriving.
Not hostility, nothing that direct, just the particular attention of people recalibrating, noting a new variable, processing what it meant. She saw two mothers near the bake sale tableclock her arrival and then clock Ethan beside her and then look at each other with the brief, loaded communication of people who already had an opinion. Ethan, for his part, moved through the gymnasium with the unhurried ease of a man who had been navigating this community for three years and had stopped caring what it thought of him sometime in year 1. He knew people. He greeted them.
He was not performing anything. He was simply present and Emma beside him, and that was the fact of the evening, whether anyone had adjusted to it or not. Lily ran ahead to find her friends, which she did within approximately 30 seconds of entering the building. Possessing, as she did, an unairring social radar that could locate a known friendly in any crowd. Emma and Ethan moved to the edge of the room where the auction items were displayed on a long folding table.
Emma was looking at a gift basket when she heard it not aimed at her. Not a stage whisper, just a voice at the wrong volume in the wrong direction. That's the one Lily talks about. The library woman since September. Apparently moved right in a small pause.
Ethan's been through so much. You'd think he'd be more careful. I know. Emma did not change her expression. She finished reading the label on the gift basket.
She set it back down. She breathed once through her nose. Ethan was 3 ft away, looking at a framed photograph someone had donated. He was looking at it with his back slightly toward the direction the voices had come from and she understood from the set of his shoulders that he had heard it too. She thought about leaving early.
She had a clear picture of how that would go polite managed a headache. She could mention the practiced exit of a woman who had been taking careful exits for 3 years. She was very good at it. It was one of her most developed skills. She looked at the back of Ethan's head.
She looked at the room full of parents and the tables of donated items and the gymnasium with the paper snowflakes Lily's class had made hanging from the ceiling in uneven clusters. She thought, "No, not tonight. Not this." She moved to where Ethan was standing. She put her hand through the crook of his arm, not urgently.
Not performatively, just the natural motion of being beside someone you were beside and looked at the photograph you're looking at. This is nice. She said it was a landscape, a good one. He looked at her hand on his arm. He looked at her face.