A Toast to the Good Times - By Liz Reinhardt Page 0,19

in my way. “Jesus Mary and Joseph, Landry, you’re going to freeze to death. On Christmas Eve. ” Her eyes are wide and worried.

“We’re still a few hours away from Christmas Eve, so don’t get all the violins out for me just yet, okay? I’ll see you in the morning, kid.”

I lean over and kiss her on the cheek, then stumble out of the car and into the snow. My parents’ property line goes all the way back into the woods, the same ones I grew up playing in with Paisley and my brother Henry. I follow the line back to the thick trees, then veer off to the left side of the property. There’s a shed out here I used to sleep in when I was torn up over a girl and didn’t want to hear shit from Henry, or too drunk to face Mom, or too sick of dealing with my family’s drama to go into the crowded, suffocating house.

I push on the rough wooden door and it creaks open.

My dad’s voice breaks through the frigid night air and scares the shit out of me. I jump back and almost fall over the crooked threshold.

“Landry?”

He says it like a question, like he maybe doesn’t believe I’m really here.

Or just wishes I weren’t.

I clear my throat, trying to make room for the words around what feels like a lump of coal in my throat.

“Paisley asked me to come...” I let my voice drift off.

The way he’s working his jaw back and forth and rubbing the back of his neck without meeting my eyes, tells me he doesn’t care why I’m here. I open my mouth and start to say something else, what I don’t know, but I let it clamp shut again.

All of the words we could say hang in the air.

The sharp ones that cut like shards of broken beer bottles.

The ones that are sticky and polluted as old fly paper.

And the meaner, nastier, snaring ones that drag in all our regrets and leave them in a tangled, diseased net we can’t break out of.

But neither one of us say any of them.

My dad looks me up and down, taking me in with eyes identical to the ones that stare back at me in the mirror every morning while I shave, and then he walks out on me without one more word.

Chapter 6

The logical thing to do would be to go to sleep. But the shed is a hell of a lot colder than I remember it being, maybe because I’m older now and used to sleeping in an actual bed in an actual insulated apartment, and not a cot in some drafty-ass shed. Maybe also because the remnants of my hangover are wearing away in the frosty night, and the residual warmth the last vestiges of alcohol in my system offered is all gone now.

I kick the door open and stalk back to Paisley’s car, then remember I have no keys. I can just go in the house. The upstairs hall light is on. Paisley is probably bunking down in her bed. Henry is probably up playing video games. Dad is waking Mom with his quiet, brooding fury. And I could head down to the basement apartment I used to play grown-up in and catch up on some much-needed sleep.

But I’m not ready, and my renewed irritation at running into my father led me to catch a dangerously sleep-deprived second wind. I scroll through my phone as I stalk down the street through the bitter cold and see that I have a friend request on Facebook. I have no idea why I’m even on the stupid site. I never bothered to access my account until my asshole ex-girlfriend got it on with my business partner, and then all I used it for was self-torture and stalking. Looking at pictures of the two of them together and knowing they would probably head back to Jersey is part of what kept my ass firmly planted in Boston.

The friend request is from Toni, sent a few minutes before.

So she’s still up.

Mila updated her status an hour ago to: “Spoonful’s of decadent amaretto-laced chocolate mousse and back-to-back Firefly and Serenity marathons can remedy even the most disastrous night. Right?”

Damn it.

Fucking damn it.

She hasn’t pulled out those Blu-rays since the douche she had a crush on for eight months wound up having a pregnant girlfriend tucked away in the dorms he never bothered to mention during all the time he spent trying