“Go on.”
I take a bite. Sweet potato pie is not supposed to be this good. It is supposed to be fine, and good enough except this one.
“It’s the same.”
“It better be the same.”
“It’s the best.”
She slaps the back of my neck lightly, which is her version of affection after affection, and then she goes to the living room with a plate for my dad and a plate for my mama, who pretends she was not going to eat pie and then eats it.
I stay another hour. Mama and Nan rearrange the kitchen the way they did yesterday and the way they will tomorrow. My dad watches his Minnesota fish. I help Nan carry two Tupperwares of pie out to her freezer in the garage, because Nan’s freezer situation is a system that requires a second pair of hands every December. She pats the side of my face when we’re done.
“You come back this week.”
“Okay, Nan.”
She lets me kiss her forehead, and she squeezes my shoulder with more strength than a woman her size has any business having, and then she stands in her doorway with her arm aroundmy mama’s waist while I get in the car. My dad waves once through the kitchen window.
The drive back down home takes fifteen minutes. Christmas lights on by six, the old houses along the road lit up the same way they were last year and the year before that. I pass the church on the corner of Beecher where Nan used to take me, the station where I bought my first pack of gum with my own money. My music is low and I turn it lower without deciding to, and then I notice, and I leave it.
My apartment is how I left it. Shoes by the door, coffee set up for the morning. I hang up my coat and sit on the couch.
I check my phone.
Text from Marchetti. Sent twenty minutes ago. I did not hear it come in because I was driving.
A song link.
hope you’re having a good holiday
That is it. The song is one I don’t know, which he does on purpose, because he figured out by October that the game of sending me something I don’t know is more interesting to both of us than sending me something I do.
I press play. Slow. Vocals low in the mix, an acoustic line underneath. Not one of the ones that has been on my drive rotation. One I haven’t heard before but I like because he’s good at that, because he pays attention to what I respond to and adjusts.
I lean back against the couch and let it play.
The pen box is on my counter. I put it there when I got home from the facility the day he gave it to me, set it down next to the coffee maker because that end of the counter is where things go when I have not decided what to do with them. I have walked past it eleven times in six days and not once reached for it.
I get up now. The song is still playing as I go to the counter and pick up the box. My thumb finds the edge of the lid without needing to look.
I sit back down and open it.
Two pens in black velvet. I pick up the fountain pen first. It is weighted, not heavy, but weighted so your hand knows it is holding a tool and not a toy. I roll it between my fingers. The clip has the firebird on it, small, the way he said. I angle it to the lamp.
I set the fountain pen back in the velvet and pick up the rollerball. Lighter. Simpler. I turn it over and the firebird is on the same side of the clip, the same angle, the same tiny distance from the tip. He had this engraved and I am holding it in my palm in my apartment on Christmas night while a song he sent me plays from my phone on the couch.
I have watched him hum while he is waiting for me to finish a note. He was watching me write with the skipping pen. He has been watching me write with the skipping pen since October.
I put the rollerball back in the velvet. My hand is steadier than my chest is. I close the box and set it on the coffee table in front of me and pull my feet up onto the couch.
It’s a pen set. I can put it in the drawer with everything else I have decided not to look at too closely, the songs and the singing in the hallway and the way he says my last name like it has a different number of syllables than it does. I can file it there and go to bed and in the morning the drawer will still be closed and I will make my coffee and the pens will be on the coffee table and they will just be pens.
The song ends and another starts, whatever he queued for me, and I let that one play too. I don’t text him back tonight. I will, in a day or two, with another song in reply, and he will send another, and we will keep doing this thing I didn’t know to draw a line around because I didn’t know it would become a thing. Ididn’t know it would work its way into my daily life, quiet and steady, the way a song gets into your head before you notice you’re humming it.
I look at the pens on the coffee table. I don’t pick them back up. I don’t need to. I can see them fine from right here.
Marchetti Sisters Chat #1
