Chapter 12
“Are you sure we have to leave tomorrow?” I whine as Neil and I sit on the floor, in front of the couch, staring at the burning fire. To the left of us is where the decorated and lit tree stands. The fire and the lights from the tree create the only illumination in the entire cabin.
“I’m sure,” he says, planting a kiss on my temple.
I let out a disappointed sigh and take another sip of my wine. I’ve grown more comfortable drinking alcohol around him. He never makes a big deal out of it and even offered to pick me up the bottle of the kind I liked when we went to the town store the day before.
“We can come back here for Christmas,” he suggests. “My parents, sister, and her family will be in town then.”
I turn to glance at him over my shoulder. “Really? Your whole family will be here?”
He nods.
“And you want me to come?”
“Why does that sound strange to you?”
I turn away from him and stare at the stockings we’ve hung on the mantle of the fireplace. There’re stockings with his entire family’s name, including his mother, father, younger sister, her husband, and their four-year-old son.
Neil surprised me as we were decorating by adding a stocking with my name to the mantle.
“It’ll be our first Christmas … together as a …” I hesitate and turn to look at him again. “Are we a couple? As in officially.”
“We better be. You’re part of the family now.” He gestures toward the hanging stockings.
I smile, but there’s a warning feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Your sister was good at lying, too.”
My mother’s scornful words rush back to me. They’ve been playing on rotation off and on, the entire three days we’ve been here in the mountains. I do my best to ignore them, but they sneak up, especially in moments like this when my heart is telling me to go all in.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks.
“Christmas. And Dierdre. This was her favorite time of year, too.” I sit up, placing the glass of wine on the wooden and concrete coffee table.
Turning to Neil, I say, “She loved Christmas and the holidays almost as much as I do. When we were kids, we’d spend hours in the kitchen with my mother, learning to cook, bake, and make homemade gifts.
My mother taught us that homemade gifts were the best because they take more time and effort than going to the store and buying something.”
He nods. “Sounds a little like my mother. She isn’t much of a cook. Never was. Our holidays were always prepared by a chef or catered by a local restaurant, but starting in September, she’d spend hours in her studio, painting pictures to give out to friends and family during this time of year.”
“She inspired your love of art?”
“Yeah. Ever since I was five years old, she dragged my sister and me around to museum after museum on our holidays or school breaks. I can’t tell you how many summers I spent learning the ins and outs of everything from oil painting to sand painting.”
“Sand painting?”
He nods, grinning. “It’s a thing.”
I laugh, but eventually, I sober, my lips frowning. “I bet your mother didn’t expend energy on telling you everything you did wrong.”
He shakes his head. “Is that what yours did?”
I twist my lips, recalling memories of my childhood. There’d been many occasions where the three of us got along well. “Not all the time, admittedly. But you’ve been around her, a little. You see how she rarely misses an opportunity to critique what I’m wearing, if I’m slouching too much, how I pin up my hair. She did the same with Dierdre.”
“And you believe that’s why Dierdre turned out how she did?”
Lifting my eyebrows, I ask, “What else could it be? We had a mostly idyllic childhood. My father was one of the few black professors in our college town and is well respected. We lived in a safe, middle-class community and spent our summers at expensive day camps. My mother stayed home with us until I started first grade.
