Page 42 of Wintering with George

“Wait, I⁠—”

“First off, we’re gonna watch movies. Boys? Suggestions?”

It turned out, in a horrifying discovery, the boys had never seen Elf. Worse, they’d never seen Die Hard, which Kurt insisted was not a Christmas movie, and I agreed that after the day before, we didn’t need to watch that one. They’d also never seen Home Alone or A Christmas Story, and I assured Thomasin and Brad that they were bad parents.

“I beg your pardon,” she replied, aghast.

“They’ve never seen Home Alone?”

“It’s violent,” she said flatly.

“Gimme a break.”

“So we have to watch TV or do homework?” Dennis was clarifying my position that I’d laid down earlier.

“That’s correct.”

“You’re a weird guy,” he told me.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I’ll watch Christmas movies,” Toby assured me, smiling. “Even though Mom says that watching too much TV is bad for your brain.”

“How bad?”

“Rots it.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“What does your grandmother say about that?” I asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Kurt asked, confused by my question, as he’d missed the earlier concerns, or at least the ones the boys had shared, of Brad’s mother.

“You’re going to hell for bringing that up,” Brad assured me.

“What’s happening right now?” Kurt pressed.

“I will kill her and then you,” Thomasin warned me.

“Mom!” Dennis scolded her.

“I think your grandmother would be down with wintering,” I told the boys.

“Please tell me what you’re all talking about?” Kurt pleaded.

And Thomasin was more than happy to bring him up to speed, starting with me being a bad seed and an instigator.

EIGHT

I understood. It had to be strange for them. As odd as I thought their family traditions were, mine, the nothingness, the hibernation, had to be just as weird.

“This is just the outlier Christmas,” I told them as we feasted on lasagna and garlic bread and fried chicken, which Kurt had been stunned that I could make.

He kept looking from the plate of chicken to me and back again. “How?”

“Clearly, you don’t know everything about me.”