Elise gets here. She can meet you both. Boom boom. It’s done.”
“Christmas Eve?”
He threw up his hands. “It’s either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, honey. Elise will be gone after that.” He picked up both bowls and carried them to the counter. “I’m trying to work her into your busy schedules.”
I stayed up late that night, though I didn’t read or watch television. I sat in the dark in the living room, wrapped in a blanket because the leather couch felt cold. The central heat turned on with a hum. A poinsettia plant, a gift from my father’s secretary, sat in the middle of the glass table. My mother would be alone on Christmas Eve. Elise and I would be having dinner with our father and Susan O’Dell.
My mother might not be all that upset about the evening, even if she knew. There was a chance she would spend Christmas Eve listening to Judy Garland and sobbing into her pillow, but it was more likely that she would use the time to fix up her new apartment. Or she would read, Bowzer lying beside her. Either way, Susan O’Dell’s presence at my father’s table wouldn’t change anything about her night. They had shot off in different directions, my parents. One trajectory no longer affected the other. And I didn’t have to feel sorry for her, or angry on her behalf, because even she no longer seemed angry.
I was just about to go to bed when Tim called. He was at his parents’ house in Chicago, the only one still awake. The upstairs was full of siblings and in-laws and cousins, he said. He had two nephews in sleeping bags in his room. He was calling from a corner of the basement, between his parents’ old luggage and empty ornament boxes, because it was the only place in the house he could be alone. His voice was noncommittal, his words clipped. He said he just wanted to wish me a merry Christmas. That was all. But I sat up straight and pressed the phone aginst my ear. It wasn’t Christmas yet, and it was late at night.
“How’s your family?” I asked.
“Good. Okay. My little brother is being kind of a dick. He’s started smoking, and he acts like James Dean, out on the front porch. One of my sisters-in-law made fun of him, and he got mad, stormed out for the night. My mom cried. So there’s been drama.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. I tended to imagine Tim’s family as if they lived in a Norman Rockwell picture, only wearing expensive, tasteful clothes instead of overalls and flowered dresses. But of course real trouble would occasionally arise, with that many people in the house.
“How’s yours?” he asked.
“Okay.” The central heating had clicked off. The condo was perfectly quiet. “Just, you know, spread out.” I sighed until I laughed. There was too much to say if this was just a quick call. If he really only called to wish me a good Christmas, then anytime now, he would say he had to go.
“I miss you,” I said.
There was a long pause, both of us silent. I didn’t hang up, and neither did he.
Two days before Christmas, my mother invited me over. Her new apartment was less than a mile from her old one, a little closer to the mall. The entire complex—green with white shutters—was nestled into a slope, and my mother’s apartment, which the landlord called ground-level, could only be entered by first descending five concrete steps. You opened the door to a big, brown-carpeted room with no windows except for sliding glass doors on the opposite wall. The eyelet bedspread hung from the curtain rod. A bowl of pinecones sat on the counter. She had driven in a nail by the sliding doors—a rudimentary hook for Bowzer’s leash. “He doesn’t have to deal with stairs if we go out this way.” She gazed out the sliding glass doors to the little patch of frozen yard, and beyond that, the pines that muffled the roar of the interstate. “Really,” she said. “It’s perfect.”
She still didn’t have any furniture except my grandmother’s lamp and a twin mattress that she’d found at a thrift store. Haylie’s mother had helped her squeeze it into the van and then carry it down the steps and into the apartment and, finally, around the corner to the little square bedroom in back. The bedroom’s light fixture was a translucent globe in the center of the ceiling that my