Steve seems to be the only one still grumbling, but all the women ignore him, and Marie presses play onThe Wedding Singer.
Alice hasn’t seen the movie in years and it’s even funnier than she remembered, so she inadvertently takes a large sip of wine right before one particularly funny moment (“Julia Gulia”), which results in her making a relatively horrible noise as she swallows it all at once to keep from spitting it out with laughter.
“Um, what the fuck was that?” Van asks, reaching over like Alice might need the Heimlich. “You alive?”
“I’m fine,” Alice chokes, her eyes watering, trying to wave off Van’s concern, but she still can’t exactly breathe.
All the commotion is too much for Frank, who leaps up onto the couch to personally make sure she’s okay, which is very sweet but does involve him standing directly on her legs, all sixty pounds of him boring down into her thighs, and his tongue licking her entire face.
“Oof! Frank, hon—okay, that wasinsidemy mouth—ouch, baby, not to body-shame you, but you’re heavy as shit.”
Marie laughs, helping Alice haul Frank off herself, pullinghim down to sit between the two of them. Alice slides over to make room for him, which means she’s now pressed into Van’s side.
Van shifts around, and Alice is about to kick Frank off the couch so she can scooch back into the middle and stop making Van uncomfortable, but then suddenly everything feels better. It takes Alice a beat to realize it’s because Van has been trying to extract her arm, and now it’s draped over the back of the couch, right behind Alice’s shoulders. Alice knows it’s to make more room on the couch for their bodies, not because she’s trying to, like, hold Alice or something ridiculous like that, but still.
Tell that to her stupid brain and her horny body, which are firing off warning signals like she’s a tween on a first date.
“Pause it,” Babs says after a few more minutes. “It’s donut time.”
Alice is incredibly full, but Aunt Sheila insists that’s part of the holiday, so Alice manages to eat half of a truly delicious jelly donut, covered in a generous helping of powdered sugar that immediately goes everywhere. Apparently much of the kitchen banging was Babs and Aunt Sheila making them from scratch, which Alice didn’t even know you could do. It’s dicey to eat a jelly donut on a couch without all of the jelly splatting out onto your lap, but somehow Alice manages.
After her donut triumph, Alice’s eyelids start to feel heavy, like they’re as weighed down by fried food as the rest of her is. The only thing keeping her awake is the slight chill in the room as the temperature outside keeps dropping.
Babs must be feeling the cold too, because as soon as she’s brushed the powdered sugar off her shirt she immediately digs through the blankets—the ones that were already out and the others Van got down from the closet earlier—and hands one toeach person. Alice wonders if the donuts were slightly hallucinogenic, because no way is everyone being given their own blanket with sleeves?
“Is that…are these Snuggies?”
“Yup,” Marie says, happily burrowing into the one her mom hands her. “Mom’s obsessed.”
“You can knit in them!” Babs says, like this is something Alice has been struggling with her entire life. “Oh no, but we brought some to the hospital. So we’re short one.” She looks up from the box, dismayed. She has one in each hand, a blue and a pink, but she, Van, and Alice are all blanket-less. She looks around the room quickly, clearly taking stock, and before Alice can say anything, Babs walks over and hands the blue one to Van. “You two girls can share,” she says, gesturing between her and Alice. “Since that dog is making you sit so close together anyway.”
“He has a name,” Marie says, tucking part of her blanket over Frank’s skinny back, clearly offended by “that dog.”
Alice decides to focus on how cute Frank looks all covered up, only his enormous head poking out, instead of what it’ll be like to be cuddled up under a blanket with Van. Van takes the blanket with a quiet “Thanks, Mom,” and Alice wonders why Babs doesn’t want to share one with her literal husband. Wouldn’t that make more sense than to encourage Alice to snuggle even closer to her boyfriend’s extremely hot sister?
Okay, Babs probably (hopefully?) doesn’t know Van’s extremely hot, but still! If Van were a dude, Alice would one hundred percent be in her own Snuggie right now. It’s not that Alice wants Van to be a dude, or for anyone in the room to be aware of her raging crush or anything, but, come on. The weird forced-asexuality of their gay child is the second most awkward thing to happen tonight, for sure.
But Van clearly isn’t going to protest. She shakes out the blanket, sliding her right hand through the armhole and putting her left back behind Alice again, using it to tuck the blanket up over Alice’s shoulders. “You don’t have to use the arm thingy,” Van says softly, “but it’s kind of amazing.”
Alice wriggles her left arm into it—she’ll try anything once—and, dang. Van’s right. Alice can pet Frank’s head without jostling the entire blanket or losing the heat that she and Van are rapidly generating.
She doesn’t know how to knit, but she honestlycouldknit in this thing.
Marie presses play, and Adam Sandler comes back onto the screen, singing some hit from the eighties, and Alice finds herself melting into the couch. Warm, soft, and full, she doesn’t even panic when Van’s arm slips down from the couch cushion to rest on her shoulders. It’s dark in the room, but Alice doesn’t want to have to explain to anyone, so she gently reaches up and tucks the corner of the blanket over Van’s hand, trapping her in their little navy-blue cocoon.
Van’s thumb rubs up and down, hot even over the layers of Alice’s shirt and sweater.
Alice can see the last vestiges of the candles still burning in the windowsill. She lets herself sink into Van, her right side pressed into Van’s body from shoulder to ankle, the front of her shirt lightly dusted with sugar. When the movie ends, Alice realizes that her hand is on Van’s thigh. She doesn’t remember putting it there, but she knows that it feels right.
—
An hour later, after the credits have rolled and the candles have gone cold, Van stands up and reaches toward the ceiling to stretch. “Okay,” she says, as Alice pointedly doesn’t look to seeif there’s a strip of stomach visible under her sweater. “Alice, I can take you home. Mom, I’ll be back in thirty.”
Alice tilts her head, confused. “Wait, you’re coming back here?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna crash here tonight,” Van says, holding out a hand to help pull Alice out of the comfortable nest of a couch. “Easier to leave Frank here in the morning than to schlep him up north and then come back here before hitting the hospital. And I usually don’t like to drive at night, but your place isn’t too far.”
But Alice is shaking her head. “If you’re staying here, why would you drive me home?”
