Page 42 of I’m Dreaming of a New York Christmas

‘Oh yeah, me and Rick are obsessed with shark movies. The weirder the better.’

‘Omigod, have you watched Under Paris?’

‘Of course. A masterpiece.’

‘They really ought to have stayed out of the Seine.’

‘That triathlon was just too important to the corrupt mayor.’

‘Okay… and “flying”?’

‘Ah, well, that’s one of the aforementioned phobias: I’m terrified of flying.’

‘I quite enjoy it,’ I said absentmindedly, as I kept notetaking.

‘So many people say this to me, but I just don’t get it. You’re in a hunk of metal in the frickin’ sky. We’re not meant to be up there!’

‘Sure, but we’re not meant to be staring at electronic screens for nine hours a day and infusing our bloodstreams with processed cocoa beans and milk from an artificially impregnated cow.’ I raised the dregs of my freebie hot chocolate to my mouth and took a sip to hammer home my point. ‘Plus, aviation’s one of the only industries that learns from past mistakes. If a plane crashes, measures are put in place to make sure the same error doesn’t happen again. I feel safer in a plane than I do on a bus.’

‘You raise some good points, Flora, but the moment I step on a plane I freak out. It’s involuntary. Like you and eggs. Rational arguments won’t change my mind.’

‘Hence the family road trip all the way to Seattle?’

‘Yeah, it was a mission – the whole trip lasted weeks one summer. But core memories and all that, y’know?’

I nodded, but did I know? Most of my primary family-related memories seemed to involve me cowering in a random plot of land while someone with authority over said land tried to shoo us away. That’s why meeting Will had felt like such a relief; he’d felt like family from the off. Like home. All my happiest memories had him at the heart of them, in sharp, high-definition focus. And now he’d never be part of my life again.

‘I guess airplanes aren’t all bad, though,’ Ethan mused, snapping me out of my thoughts.

‘No?’

‘Yeah, I mean, one of them brought you here.’

If my arms hadn’t been covered by multiple layers of fabric, Ethan would have surely noticed all the hairs on them raising in acknowledgement of his words.

‘Oh! So… I could help you with your speech?’ Why was my voice all squeaky?

Breathe, you absolute dweeb.

His response took longer than it ought to have done, and he didn’t look at me when he finally did answer. ‘Yep.’

I swallowed, attempting to re-focus on the task at hand, drawing a wiggly line from one corner of a fresh notebook page to the other, with a few dots along it. ‘This road trip. I’m wondering if it could form the backbone of the speech.’

Ethan shuffled even closer to me so he could get a clearer look at my notepad. ‘In what way?’

‘You could open with a story about it, use the metaphor of a road trip as a framework for everything else you want and need to say, with some funny stories dotted here and there, like waymarkers along the route.’ I doodled on the page as I spoke, sensing Ethan was a visual thinker and that this would help him better understand my plan. ‘And then you can segue into how Rick’s own journey has forked off from yours, and taken him to… oh, I don’t even know the name of his fiancée!’

‘Sinead.’

I wrote her name down and underlined it. ‘How it’s taken him to Sinead, and all the adventures they’ll have on their own future travels, and then loop back around to a standout memory from the first road trip you shared together.’

‘Fuck, you’re really good at this.’

‘Oh. Thanks.’

‘No, I mean, like, you’re really good.’

‘C’mon, it’s not like I’m the only one sitting on the freezing pavement of a New York street who might underplay their talents every so often. How many times has your work featured in The New Yorker?’