“Herprofessor,” Madeline says again. “Okay, what other scandalous family shit have you been hiding from me?”
“Why’dyou wait untiltodayto take this down?” I ask Wyatt as dry pine needles stab me in the face.
“Because it’s potluck night,” he says. “Higher.”
I turn my face away and lift the very dead Christmas tree another inch so he can finally get the stand out from underneath it. On the other side, through the needles, I can see Barry sitting on the fireplace mantle, fluffy orange tail swishing.
“Don’t you dare,” I tell her.
“Barry would never,” Wyatt says. “Would you?”
Barry gives me a look that saysI absolutely the fuck would.
“Didn’t Beast cause Christmas-tree problems at Silas’s parents’ house last year?” I say, still making eye contact with this cat. “Maybe it’s genetic.”
“Okay, I’ve mapped a course around the couch, past the table, and through the front door,” Wyatt says, ignoring my cat concerns. “It’s not the most direct route, but it avoids carpet, andfuckvacuuming pine needles out of carpet.”
Ten minutes later, Wyatt’s month-old Christmas tree is no longer a fire hazard, he’s vacuuming pine needles from carpeting despite his best efforts, and I’m walking through his kitchen to the laundry room so I can toss the tree skirt into the washer.
On the way, I walk past a Fancy Chickens calendar, open to January, and I remember what Lainey said about a gold star on my three-years-sober anniversary. The one I didn’t really celebrate. On a whim, I flip to next December, and that’s how Wyatt finds me: standing in his kitchen with his calendar heldopen, a fancy chicken on the top and the December grid on the bottom, the tree skirt still in my hand.
On the nineteenth, there’s a sparkly gold star, and beneath it, simply,Javi, 4 yrs.
“My sister got me that because she said the chicken on the front looked like me,” Wyatt says, passing behind me.
“It doesn’t have your charm,” I say without really thinking, because there’s thisstar, inDecember, with my name.
“More charm than a chicken. Got it.”
“You don’t think you’re jumping the gun a little?” I ask. I haven’t moved a muscle since he walked in here. Wyatt doesn’t say anything, but I can feel him walk up and stand next to me. It feels like a long time that we stand here, like this, looking at a date eleven months from now.
“No,” he finally says. “I don’t think I am.”
Then the door opens and it’s Gideon, all bundled up and holding a Dutch oven, so I drop the calendar and put the tree skirt in the washing machine and grab the hummus platter that I put together earlier while I was on the phone with Madeline. Then Silas shows up with some fancy Brussels sprouts that heswearsare actually going to be good, and Barry tries to steal the bacon out of them because she’s a nightmare and I have to pick her up off the counter while she shouts about it, and it’s all warm and chaotic. And on that calendar, eleven months in the future, there’s a star.
“You’ve been quiet,”Silas says as we’re leaving Wyatt’s house. “Everything okay?”
“I never said thank you,” I tell him.
He stops and looks at me in the middle of Wyatt’s asphalt driveway. From here, in the winter, you can see the road he lives on. A car goes by.
“For what?”
“For…this,” I say, which I know is wildly unspecific. “For coming to meet Thalia’s fuckup brother and talking some guy you didn’t know into moving across the state.”
The summer after I was out of rehab, I helped my sister move into a new apartment with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend’s older brother also helped, and for reasons I’ll never know, his best friend, Silas, came along, too.
“Yeah, that was a little reckless,” he admits, but he’s smiling. “Worked out, though.”
I want to sayDid it?orAre you sure about that?OrHahaha joke’s on you—all you got out of the bargain was me, but I don’t. I’m not sure whether Silas has a calendar in his kitchen or not, but I’m starting to realize he’s got a gold star in December anyway. I think, maybe, they all do.
I think, maybe, I’m the only one who doesn’t. I think that maybe I’ve taken so many days one at a time by now that thinking in months feels dangerous, like it’s tempting fate. But fate’s not why I’m here right now, is it?
“Yeah,” I say, and I’m nodding. I’m nodding too much? I’m nodding a weird amount? Shit. “It did. Work out.”
“Hey,” Silas says and puts his hand on my arm. “Hey, Javi, it’s?—”
I don’t really know who hugs who, but there we are, in Wyatt’s driveway, my hands clenched in Silas’s puffy jacket. He’s saying something soothing—“I’ve got you,” over and over again, I think—and I should let go soon. I know I should, but I don’t. Not for a while at least.
