Rose liked parties, but she loved holiday parties in particular. She liked everything about the holidays. She liked the little rituals: the decorations, the special meals, and the seasonal music. Hand turkeys for Thanksgiving. Flag cakes on the Fourth of July. “Silver Bells” in the grocery store before Christmas. She liked going out to her aunt’s inn on Martha’s Vineyard and falling asleep in the third-floor bunk room with all her cousins while conversation drifted up from downstairs.
When she was in third grade, she’d leaned in to Valentine’s Day. She cut out two dozen red construction paper hearts, traced the edges with Elmer’s glue and gold glitter, and personalized the valentines for each kid in her homeroom class, even the ones she didn’t like very much. She added stickers and pom-poms and googly eyes. She did everyone’s name in cursive with puffy paint by copying the letters from a calligraphy book, and she covered a shoebox in pretty wrapping paper to carry the cards in.
At the class party, the valentines had seemed well receivedby her classmates. Her teacher called her a sweetheart. Rose felt good about what she’d done, and she collected the little cardboard Snoopy and Garfield cards she’d received in exchange to take home in her shoebox. But at the end of the day, when she was packing up her cubby, Rose happened to look in the trash. And there, creased and discarded, were her valentines, mixed in with the used paper plates and cupcake wrappers from the party.
When Rose was still bewildered and weepy about it that night at the family cookie exchange, her aunt Max came and cast a critical eye over the salvaged cards. Rose adored her aunt Max, a beautiful lady who always wore lipstick and smelled like Chanel No. 5 instead of cigarettes. It was Max who planned the perfect holidays and hosted the entire Kelly clan at her inn multiple times a year.
You should probably have done something with candy instead. And that glitter would have gotten all over their backpacks, she told Rose.Of course they threw them out.
While hearing what she’d done wrong had stung, there had been an undercurrent of relief beneath Rose’s embarrassment. Her mistake was fixable. She could have done it right with lollypops and conversation hearts. The next year, she would. Max patted her on the head and coaxed her downstairs to the party, and Rose assumed that when she grew up, she, like Max, would know what to do about everything.
This year’s holidays, coming right on the heels of the hurricane, had not been up to Rose and Max’s standards. Max’s inn had been caught in the fringes of the storm, and for the first time Rose could remember, they had not gone out to Martha’sVineyard for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Instead of fine-tuning her stuffing recipe or coercing her toddler nephews into reindeer costumes for her personal amusement, Rose spent most of the season writing letters to the insurance company.
“Should we get started, do you think?” her aunt’s financial adviser asked significantly when Rose’s family was more than fifteen minutes late to his office.
“Have you tried the cornetti yet?” Rose evaded, shoving the box across the conference room table.
She’d brought two dozen assorted baked goods from the good Italian place on Salem Street for this meeting, because if you had to set a man trap for a Kelly at nine a.m. on the first Monday of the new year, you baited it with pastry. She was expecting her father, at least one of her uncles, and a reasonable quorum of her brothers and cousins. She’d brought pastries and made them binders just in case they hadn’t had a chance to read her emails about the inn’s repairs.
“It’s nine twenty. The gym’s going to be packed by the time I get there,” Aunt Max complained.
“Water aerobics isn’t until three,” Rose gently reminded her. “I’ll get you to your shuttle.”
Max paused, momentarily perplexed. “Oh, right,” she said. “I was thinking about pickleball. But it’s January, isn’t it?”
Max’s delicate, dark Kelly eyebrows gathered in confusion. Looking at Max was like looking into the future, her iron gray curls the natural conclusion of Rose’s black ones, her heart-shaped face the time-progressed image of Rose’s own.
She’d survived a stroke the previous year. They’d caught it quickly, and she just had a little lingering weakness on her leftside, but it had done a number on her short-term memory. So Max cast around the room, trying to establish what she was doing there with her niece and her financial adviser.
“Have you put on a little weight recently?” she asked Rose when the echoing silence of the conference room grew too loud for her.
Rose frowned over her full box of pastries, which she hadn’t even been eating on account of the hazelnut filling. Max wasn’t usually mean, and if she shared the family opinion that Rose ought to try being taller and thinner, she’d never before aired it. Some combination of boredom and disinhibition was making her pick at Rose today.
“No, I’ve always been this fat,” Rose said evenly. Her family consisted entirely of short fat people; what did they expect her to look like?
Aunt Max huffed and shifted in her seat. “I wasn’t criticizing you. I just don’t remember you looking this stressed.”
“That’s because you have short-term memory loss,” Rose pointed out. “And you saw me two days ago at dinner. Remember? We talked about all the storm damage at the inn. That’s why we’re here.”
Taken aback again, Aunt Max crossed her arms.
“The inn’s gotten to be such a wreck,” she grumbled. “I never had the money to fix it up right. Wish Peter had left me his stocks instead, but those vultures at the Harvard alumni office had their talons in him. We shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
Once her opinions on her late husband’s poor estate planning were aired for the umpteenth time and Rose dutifullynodded agreement, Max reached into her pocketbook, coming out with a section of theNew York Times. “Of course I remember we’re here to talk about the inn,” she said grumpily. She ostentatiously unfolded her paper and flapped it open so that Rose could see the front page of the Arts section.
Rose clenched her jaw when she saw the article her aunt was reading.
“That newspaper is three months old,” Rose informed her aunt.
“Oh? Well, like you said, I have short-term memory loss. It’ll be new to me,” her aunt said with purposeful sweetness.
Rose recognized the picture on the page because she couldn’t mentally erase the image of her ex-husband’s distinctive Greek-god nose smooshed up against the equally distinctive profile of Boyd fucking Kellagher.
As if she needed something else to deal with! This was the year Tom had to make the national news with his tongue in someone else’s mouth!
If theTimesarticle was to be believed, Rose had at least another year of news ahead of her about Tom smooshing faces with Boyd Kellagher onstage. And, hell, probably offstage too, based on the equally pervasive image of Tom dragging the movie star out of the floodwaters, the other man clinging to Tom’s neck like a giant, chiseled damsel in distress. Rose did not want to see it again. Those photos gave her the same uncomfortable feelings as real estate listings for homes she could never afford or other people’s holiday cards, pictures that made her quickly turn the page or close the card.
It wasn’t that she begrudged Tom his first big Broadway rolein ten years. Or kissing Boyd Kellagher. Or even Boyd Kellagher kissing Tom. She was unsurprised he had a gorgeous boyfriend now. But if Tom was going to get everything he ever wanted—love, fame, professional success—could Rose not get just one thing? If not Tom, if not a family of her own, why could she not at least get a couple of happy weeks of vacation every year spent preparing extravagant meals and group photo shoots in matching sweaters? It didn’t seem like too much to ask for.
