After that, Astrid changed the subject to Bronwyn’s fertility treatments, explaining that she’d be heading to Cornell in February for her second round of in vitro. This was news to me, and I said how sorry I was to hear that she was having trouble. As Astrid prattled on about the process, I covertly checked my phone for the hundredth time that day, still hoping to hear something from Coach on Christmas. But there was nothing from him. Nothing from anyone in Walker, for that matter, except for Miller, who had sent me a text that said, Merry Christmas to my favorite ho ho ho! I had written back, Why is a Christmas tree better than a man? Because it stays up, has cute balls, and looks good with the lights on!
As the night wore on, I missed Coach more and more, and tried to dull the pain with Barolo and cheesecake. The two-thousand-dollar check from Astrid and my dad helped, too, and I calculated that it would buy me a couple of months in my job hunt. Feeling slightly embarrassed, I went through the motions of saying it was too much, but Astrid reassured me that she had spent just as much on a handbag for Bronwyn, then kindly added, “And I assume you’d want to select your own.” As if anyone in the room believed that I’d spend that kind of cash on a purse. It was absurd, but to each her own, so I smiled and said, “Well, thank you. Really. This is so generous of you both, and I appreciate it. Especially this month.” It actually felt good to receive such a nice gift from my dad without the weight of the chip on my shoulder.
Then, after I gave them my gifts (earrings from Lucy’s store for Astrid and plaid socks and a coffee table book on cigars for my dad), we opened another bottle of wine and hunkered down to watch A Christmas Story. It didn’t seem like the sort of movie my dad would appreciate, but he cracked up over every single “You’ll shoot your eye out” and lost his mind during the tongue-on-the-flagpole scene. He told me that his brother, my only uncle, had done the same thing when he was little and that it really does stick. Then, right when Ralphie got his decoder ring in the mail, my phone finally rang, Lucy’s home number appearing on the screen.
“Don’t pause it. I’ll be right back,” I said, scrambling for the safety of my lush guest suite before answering.
“Weren’t you going to call?” she asked as soon as I said hello. She sounded wounded, which ticked me off a little. She had plenty of reason to be sad today, but no standing to be miffed at me.
“Sorry. The day just got away from me,” I said, a ridiculous statement given how slowly the minutes had dragged.
“I know. Ours, too,” she said. “So how was your Christmas?”
“Lovely,” I said, a word I never use.
She called me on it. “Lovely? You’ve been hanging out with Astrid too much.”
“She actually hasn’t been too bad this time,” I said. “It’s like she got a personality lift with her last cosmetic surgery.”
Lucy laughed.
I hesitated, at a loss for a few seconds, before I came up with “Was Santa good to Caroline?”
“Yes. Very,” she said.
“Good. Good,” I said, another awkward pause following. “Tell her I love her.”
“I will,” she said. “You want to talk to your mom? She came over a little bit ago …”
I started to say no, then made myself say yes, bristling when I heard her voice on the other end of the line.
“Hi, honey. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Mom.”
“This is the first one in your life that I haven’t seen you. It doesn’t even feel like Christmas.”
“Yeah. It’s a little weird,” I said. “But it’s nice … being in New York and stuff …” I considered calling her out for talking to my dad but secretly liked the idea of the two of them becoming a united front on my behalf, completely unlike the tenor of my entire childhood. So I let it slide.
I heard Caroline’s high-pitched voice in the background, then Coach’s low laughter. My heart ached as my mother and I said goodbye, and she gave the phone back to Lucy.
“Hi,” Lucy said.
“Hi,” I said, straining to hear Coach again, both relieved and distraught that he had sounded so chipper.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked, trying not to sound as flippant as I felt.
Lucy mumbled something I couldn’t make out, then said, “Hey. My dad’s here, too. Did you want to say hello?”
“Um, that’s okay,” I said, my throat tightening. “Just tell him I said Merry Christmas.”
“I definitely will,” she said.