WEIRDLY, IT’S THE CHRISTMAS SEASON.
I don’t feel all that festive, so after a shift spent pulling espresso shots at True Brew the day after Thanksgiving, I do the one thing sure to make me merry: descend into a baking vortex.
A few of my favorite ingredients: toasted coconut, bittersweet chocolate chips, pecans, overripe bananas, and butter. Every respectable treat involves a stick or two of butter—and not that fake, chemically processed yellow paste. It’s got to be the good stuff. Unsalted, full-fat butter. I drop a room-temperature stick into a stainless-steel mixing bowl, add sugar, then blend until light and fluffy.
Time in the kitchen is how I reclaim my center, and it just so happens Meredith has a slew of treat requests for tonight’s annual Bunco party. Before she married my dad and became Queen of Conception, she was big on volunteer work, and he’s a proud member of the city council. All this McAlder community involvement equals dozens of people showing up at our house the night after Thanksgiving to play the world’s most obnoxious dice game while drinking too much.
Far be it from me to deny the masses my delicacies.
I’ve found my happy place. Flour, eggshells, and butter wrappers are strewn over every inch of counter space, and the smells of chocolate and almond and spice dance in the air. The stove’s timer sounds. I open the door and spend a moment admiring my beautiful snowflake sugar cookies—meticulously cut and light golden brown—before gripping the edge of my favorite Williams-Sonoma baking sheet and lifting them from the oven.
Heat radiates into my fingers, conducted splendidly by a pot holder recently crocheted by my stepmother. My brain registers the pain a second too late and I yelp, dropping the baking sheet onto the countertop. It lands with a metallic clatter that echoes through the house.
I assess my fingers—red and throbbing, damn it—and then the cookies. Five of the dozen confections have fractured into jagged, unrecognizable bits. Clenching my teeth against pain and exasperation, I turn on the faucet and run cold water over my tender skin, cursing Meredith and her stupid Holly Hobbie pot holder.
She wobbles into the kitchen, probably drawn by my silent snark. Her volleyball belly has thrown her petite frame into a constant state of unbalance since it popped (her word, not mine) just after Halloween. She’s dressed in coordinating sweats, and when I say “sweats,” I mean expensive leisurewear from Nordstrom in a soft shade of pink, the only color she wears lately, because when you’re expecting a baby girl, you must constantly dress like a puff of cotton candy. She asks, “Everything okay?”
I turn off the water and hold up her pot holder. “Did you know this is ineffective?”
She blinks. “It’s pretty.”
My pulse throbs in my fingertips. I hold them up to show her. “Pretty doesn’t equal practical. What’s the point of a nonfunctioning pot holder?”
She holds a hand to her heart. “Jill, a burn? Let me get some aloe.”
The last thing I need is her coddling. Having spent much of my childhood with my walk-it-off dad, not to mention rough-and-tumble Max, I’ve developed a higher-than-average tolerance for pain. Besides, the cold water helped, and upon second inspection, the burn doesn’t seem so bad after all. “I’m fine,” I say. “Besides, I’ve got dozens of sugar cookies to finish before tonight, and then there are the peanut butter bars and pecan sandies, plus the pumpkin spice snickerdoodles I want to make for fun.”
She gives me an awed smile. Meredith doesn’t cook anything for fun. She’s the prepackaged angel food cake of housewives: light and airy, easily influenced by bolder flavors.
“Will you still be able to make the brownies?”
There’s a sigh building in my chest, but I swallow it. Sliding one of the salvageable cookies from the baking sheet with a spatula, I deposit it on a wire cooling rack. “As long as I start melting the chocolate soon.”
She attempts to straighten a cluster of glass magnets on the fridge. Her hands flutter and flit, shuffling them into a jumble as she says, “You saw the list your father left before he went into work, right? He put it on the dining room table this morning so you wouldn’t miss it.”
Because I spend loads of time in the formal dining room. Good thinking, Dad.
Meredith bustles out of the room, presumably to recover the list that’s so important my dad left it in a room nobody sets foot in. I sneak a nibble of the crumbled cookie rejects, then dump them into a Tupperware container in case I need a snack later—they look awful, but taste amazing. Then I retrieve another mound of cookie dough from the fridge. I’m rolling it across a dusting of flour when Meredith returns, waving a sheet of yellow legal paper.
“Okay, here it is,” she says, skimming the list. She hesitates. “I can help.”
I fight an eye roll. “You shouldn’t even be off the couch. Just read it.”
“So … the tree needs to be decorated, the winter village needs to be set up, the mistletoe needs to be hung, coolers need to be moved down to the basement, and when you get done with all that…” She pauses until I look up from my dough, then smiles in the way that’s sometimes helpful in exploiting my dad, but has little impact on me. “Maybe you can take care of the hors d’oeuvres?”
I set my rolling pin on the counter—gently. “Meredith!”
She’s already got a hand in the air. “I know it’s a lot. But the tree’s up and the hors d’oeuvres just need to be heated and set out—I can definitely help with that.”
She should be helping—this is her party. She talks my dad into it year after year. We should know our community, Jake. It’s good for networking, Jake. People expect it, Jake. And this year: Who cares if I’m pregnant, Jake? Jillian can help!
I pick up my rolling pin and resume my work with an urgency I lacked before, because I can do this—I can help my parents maintain tradition, a night of normalcy in a year that’s been anything but. Besides, this party’s as important to Dad as it is to Meredith. He never misses out on a chance to make business connections, hobnob with the neighbors, and put his party basement to use. I’m more than willing to surrender an afternoon to helping out if the result is his satisfaction.
“I’ll ask Kyle to come over,” I tell Meredith. Football season’s over (the boys lost their third-round play-off game—a heartbreaker) and I’m sure he’ll be willing to help out.
She grins. “I knew I could count on you.”
* * *
Kyle breezes in shortly after I call, a cloud of cologne and lively chatter. He leaps into the role of sous-chef, and when the peanut butter bars are cooling, the last batch of cookies is iced, and the brownies are baking at three hundred twenty-five degrees, we tackle decorating.
He’s putting the finishing touches on the winter village—miniature people, smiles frozen and ceramic—and I’m teetering on a chair, trying to fasten a sprig of mistletoe to the archway between the living room and the front hall, when Meredith appears, belly first, flushed and breathless. “Jillian, I’m in crisis mode!”
My thoughts soar to the baby and I nearly fall off my chair. “What’s wrong?!”
“I need you to play Bunco tonight.”
I prop a hand on my hip. “Jeez, Meredith! I thought you were in labor!”
She touches her stomach, confused. “Of course not—the baby’s months from ready. The Robertsons just canceled because Jackie has the flu. I’ve got to have you to fill the table.”
Only in Meredith’s world would uneven Bunco tables equate crisis. “Uh, no thanks.”
She gives me a pouty face. “Please! You’re my only hope.”
“Meredith, no way.” Bunco’s mindless, all about luck and a shot at winning a few bucks, and tonight’s guest list averages well beyond my age bracket. “The game will go on, even without the Robertsons.”
“But there should be four people playing at each table,” she says. “Otherwise everything will be thrown off.”
This is technically true. Though players are forever moving seats and changing partners, the game flows best with quartets. That’s why Meredith invited thirty-two people to come over tonight. But that doesn’t mean the game’s going to fall apart if only thirty show up.
“It is sort of annoying to play with empty seats,” Kyle remarks unhelpfully.
I shoot him a dark look. “Even if I play, we’re still short a person.”
“I’d fill in,” he says, “but there’s this root canal I’ve gotta get.…”
“Ha-ha,” I deadpan.
“It’s okay,” Meredith says, waving off our banter. “I talked to Marcy. Max’ll play.”
Incredulity voids my mind of suitable responses.
Kyle’s eyes are wide. “Max? Really? Becky’s cool with that?”
I manage to find my voice. “Uh … is Dad cool with that?”
“Jill, your father knows how important this party is. And Max told Marcy he’s fine with filling in, but only if you play, too.”
Wait—what? Why would Max care if I play? We’ve said perhaps twelve words to each other since our post-football-practice encounter a few weeks ago. I tilt my head, considering.
“Oh, just play, Jill,” Kyle says, sprinkling fake snow crystals over his winter scene.
“Please?” Meredith says. “I really need you.”
I toy with the sprig of mistletoe I’m still clutching.… If Max is getting in on Bunco Night, and if my joining the game means a tally on the Get Back on Dad’s Good Side scorecard I started after Halloween, well … “Fine,” I say, jabbing a thumbtack through ribbon and drywall. “I’ll play.”
Meredith smiles victoriously before toddling back to the kitchen. I hop off the chair and sink onto the couch with a sigh.
Kyle flops down beside me. “What’s with the attitude? It’s just Bunco.”
“Bunco sucks.”
“I bet you and Max’ll have fun.”
“Yeah, he’s a barrel of laughs,” I say, and then, like I’ve stepped through a magical portal, I’m transported to the night of The Kiss. I experience it all over again—the fluttering in my chest, the tingles on my skin, the heat coursing through my blood. How right it felt to be in his arms, despite all the reasons it was wrong. I recall the morning after: the fountain soda, Max’s joke about his sister’s tree-trunk ankles, the way he touched my hair like it was spun silk.
Why can’t I let it go?
“Jelly Bean,” Kyle says, bumping my knee. “Something’s bugging you. What’s up?”
I wish I could tell him, then absorb his insight and soak up his guidance. Keeping secrets from him makes me feel ill, but admitting that I was the trite other woman is freaking shameful. More than that, though, I can’t find the words necessary for expressing the weirdness I feel when I think about Max now. It’s like this door—a door I didn’t even know existed—has swung open, giving me a fleeting glimpse of a remote possibility.
Nope.
Not a possibility.
An impossibility.
“It’s nothing,” I tell Kyle, throwing off a blanket of longing. “We should get back to work, don’t you think?”
We do, and when we’re finished, he kisses my cheek and takes off, probably worried he’ll end up roped into Bunco, too.
I drag myself down the hall to shower, then consider my closet’s offerings. I pick my best jeans, dark denim that hugs my butt, and the shimmery sleeveless top Meredith gave me for my last birthday. It’s unsuitable for the November chill, but hey, Max is apparently playing Bunco because I am. Why not be a sparklier version of myself while taking part in a game I hate with a boy I’m suddenly hot-and-cold for?
When I’m dressed, I blow my hair out and curl it into soft waves. Then I tackle my makeup, finishing with gloss that leaves my lips with an objectionable sticky feeling.
Anti-kissing gloss.
Tucking the tube into the pocket of my jeans, I take a deep breath and attempt to get my shit together before Max and his family arrive.