Love Lessons (31 page)

Walter shut his eyes tighter. “No, it’s just collective. And then I got drunk, which I think may have made it worse.”

Kelly’s frustrated sigh was a balm even as it made Walter feel guilty for causing it. “I wish you were here, or I were there.”

“Three days,” Walter reminded him. He hadn’t started counting the hours yet, but he wanted to.

“You can come earlier if you want. You can come tomorrow.”

Why was it Kelly’s offerings always made him feel good and bad at the same time? “I’m not interrupting your family stuff. Besides, I have my sentence in hell to finish out first. Including a purgatory dinner with Dad tomorrow night.”

“There’s nothing left to interrupt here, and you wouldn’t have anyway. It’s just us tomorrow and Christmas Day, and everybody’s going crazy talking about meeting you, except for Dad who keeps getting grilled over the two hours he’s spent in your company. You don’t have to wait until the twenty-seventh. Come anytime you want. Let me know you’re on the way as you leave.”

“Maybe I’ll come on the twenty-sixth,” Walter said, the vodka unfurling his resistance to barging in on the Davidsons.

“Awesome. I’ll tell Mom.” Kelly’s voice went soft and sad. “Take care of yourself, Walter. Don’t let them drag you down. And stop lying to me about how much it’s bothering you.”

Walter’s throat was thick. “It’s not only you I’m trying to lie to.”

There was a long, heavy pause on the line. “Come on Christmas Day. Please. For me. Because I’m going to be a wreck until you’re here. I don’t care if that sounds pathetic or clingy or if you hate it. I’d beg you to start out tomorrow, but I know skipping Christmas Eve and Christmas morning will make things worse. Maybe you can’t come Christmas Day, but God, I want you to. Just come.
Please
.”

The word cut across the center of Walter’s chest, and he said, his voice almost a whisper, “All right.”

The rest of the conversation was Kelly babbling excitedly about what time he should leave and what the weather was like and how he should respond if it upset his family that he was leaving early. Walter heard about a third of it, caught up in the spinning sensation of relief that came with realizing he was about to get the hell out of hell. He went to bed that night not entirely sure it hadn’t been part of a drunken hallucination, but in addition to one mother of a headache, he had two emails and seven texts from Kelly with further weather updates and admonishments for him to not go back on his promise to come on Christmas Day.

The kitchen rocked with the drama between his grandmother, mother and sister—they were making cookies, ostensibly, but mostly this was the backdrop for a
Real Housewives of Northbrook
episode—so Walter slipped out to bring home dinner for them from Whole Foods and prepare his long-coveted gift basket for the Davidsons. It proved more difficult than he’d thought, and he nearly broke down twice in the frozen section because he couldn’t quite work out how to get chocolate coconut ice cream to Minnesota without it melting. He ended up at a lower-rent grocery buying a massive cooler and enough dry ice to stop global warming, then went back to cleaning Whole Foods out of everything he thought Kelly and his family might ever possibly desire.

He ended up dropping eight hundred dollars on the food basket, not including the two hundred he spent on a handcrafted wicker container from a boutique next door to put the whole thing in—and it wouldn’t all fit. It barely fit in his hatchback, and God, but he hoped the dry ice would last that long. It was far, far too much.

It didn’t feel like even close to enough.

By the time Walter got to dinner with Tibby and his father at Fogo de Chão, he was so strung out he could barely eat. Kelly texted him every hour, demanding reassurance that Walter was okay. Walter wasn’t, but he kept both of them sane by reporting everything as it happened, that his mother and grandmother had made his gift of dinner into a sign of how badly their family had fallen apart and retreated to their rooms, that Tibby seemed wooden, and he worried, that his dad had brought his girlfriend and it was beyond awkward. Before heading back home after with Tibby, Walter texted Kelly his longing to reach out to his sister, but that he feared teasing her with more help than he could give. Kelly suggested he take her out to the barn for Christmas Eve to see Harper, which was so brilliant and perfect Walter felt dumb for not thinking of it. It turned out to be ten thousand times better than the present he had under the tree. Watching his sister love her Friesian had a side effect of healing Walter too, and when they finally got home for the night at eleven, they both went to bed with smiles on their faces.

In the light of Christmas morning, he doubted the wisdom of leaving that day. He couldn’t comfortably get away until after lunch, and that would put him at a Windom arrival of nine thirty at the earliest unless he drove like a bat out of hell the whole way—which given the fact that he’d face at least two bands of snow flurries en route, seemed stupid as fuck. He was debating whether or not to try for a midpoint hotel at least as a backup due to weather when they sat down to open presents after breakfast—and there his grandmother and mother tossed the flaming turd that finally broke Walter’s back.

Shari had opened Walter’s gift to her: a high-end silver photo frame with gorgeous cutouts and collage space for photos, which Walter had painstakingly filled with images of himself, Tibby, and his mother and grandmother, images ranging from Shari’s birth until the day before when he’d been able to snap the three women smiling before another snarling match. It had been the project he’d done in his room to save his sanity, and as he watched his mother open it, tears in her eyes for its beauty, he wished he’d have taken even more time to polish it and make it the best offering he could. For that moment, the gift was everything Walter knew how to be.

Grandma Marissa leaned over Shari’s shoulder, sniffed and tipped her mimosa to her lips. “You look at it and feel Cal’s absence like a knife, don’t you?”

Shari blinked, then blinked again, and as Walter watched, all the light and happiness he’d put there drowned in the return of her pain.

It was too much. It was too far. It was such a smack across the face Walter didn’t even yell, didn’t so much as cut his grandmother a glare. He only rose, went to his room and started to pack. He barely had three items in his duffel when he heard someone at his door. Stiffening, he readied himself to face his mother or worse, his grandmother. When he turned, however, it was Tibby who stood in the doorway, looking tired and sad and a lot more grownup than she had a right to be.

“I’m sorry,” she said, giving an apology for the other women she had no business having to deliver. “It’s a beautiful frame. I’m going to do my best to convince Mom Grandma is a piece of shit and that we should hang the collage over the mantle, especially because Dad isn’t in it.” She spied the duffel on Walter’s bed and grew sadder. “You’re going to Kelly. You’re leaving now.”

Walter paused with a pair of socks in his hand.
I can stay for you,
he wanted to say, should have said, but when he opened his mouth, all he could manage was, “I can’t take it. I’m so sorry.” He looked away. “I should stay for you, I know, but—”

“What?” She sounded almost angry. “What the hell would that accomplish? That we’d both be miserable?” She curled her lip and shook her head. “I mean, God, I’m so jealous of you being able to get away I’m sick with it, but it’s not like you being here would change anything. Just one more person to fight with.”

“I don’t like leaving you here,” Walter said.

“Well, you’re not taking me with you unless you bring Harper too.” Her face softened. “Thank you so much for taking me to the barn last night. That was the best, seriously.”

“If I were here, I could take you more often.”

“Please. I’ll bum a ride or use my Christmas money from Dad to take a taxi. Besides, I get my license in three months. I plan to sugarcoat Dad and his bimbo until they buy me a car. Or I’ll hoard my allowance and buy some piece of shit that gets me from here to there and nowhere else.”

“I’ll help you if you need it,” Walter promised.

Tibby smiled, still sad, but she looked a lot stronger than Walter had realized she was. “It’s going to be okay. I promise you: it’s going to be okay. You’re going to go to Minnesota with your boyfriend, and I’m going to get my ass to the barn this afternoon if I have to hitchhike. We’re all going to be fine.”

He ended up taking her on the way out of town—they grabbed Chinese takeout for brunch, enough to hold her over until dinner if she could get away with staying that long, and he left Tibby heading for the barn lounge burdened with bags of tack and gifts and food and seeming ten thousand pounds lighter than she’d been in the living room with their family.

Walter watched her go, remembering what she’d told him yet again as he’d dropped her off, their mother and grandmother’s cries of betrayal and abandonment still ringing in his ears.

“We’re going to be okay,” he whispered to the snow falling gently against his windshield. “We’re going to be okay.”

He let the words echo for a minute, then pulled out his wireless handset and dialed Kelly as he headed north for the interstate.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Until the Walter’s Mazda pulled into his family’s driveway, Kelly was a raving mess.

He started out okay, all but sitting on his cellphone and spinning his class ring around his finger as he waited for Walter’s intermittent reports and chat sessions until traffic or weather dictated he hang up. The only way Kelly survived those radio darknesses was by reminding himself that every mile Walter put between himself and Northbrook seemed to make him lighter. Until Walter was in front of him, however, visibly put together and happy, he wasn’t going to be able to completely relax.

“I have the soup on,” his mom told him when Walter lost service in western Wisconsin. “Black bean, the one with the tomato base that’s kind of a chili, and I have some bread and salad. I was trying to decide what to make for dessert. Got any ideas? Or should we just go with cookies?”

“He’s addicted to my chocolate coconut milk ice cream. Do we have any?” It was a stupid question, he realized too late, because of course they didn’t. That shit was five dollars a pint. “Sorry.”

She rubbed Kelly’s arm and gave him an encouraging smile. “If the store were open, I’d have your dad go pick some up. We still do treats, Walter, and this is Christmas.”

“I wish he were here, that it wasn’t so far. God, he sounded awful when he first called. I hope I never meet his grandmother, because I’ll probably deck her instead of saying hello.”

“You do that and I’ll paddle your behind.” She let go of Kelly’s arm and rubbed his shoulders. “I’m sure he’s fine, hon. In any event, he’s on his way here now, and we’ll all do our best to help him put his bad holiday behind him. I just wish I’d have gotten him more than one gift to open.”

“Trust me. If we sit around the table and have real human conversation and play a board game afterward, that’ll be better than a million dollars.”

“I think we can manage that.” She clucked her tongue and stopped rubbing Kelly’s shoulder as she moved back to the kitchen. “Poor boy. Maybe I’ll make cornbread too, that new recipe I told you about that uses masa flour and pumpkin. Nothing says love like good cornbread.”

Kelly ended up helping his mother put the recipe together to distract himself. It wasn’t hard, but it was fun, because it involved the cast-iron pan in the oven, which Kelly always enjoyed. It smelled delicious, and Kelly couldn’t wait to eat it. Not just because when he got to, Walter would be there.

At seven thirty he arrived, finding the house no problem thanks to his GPS, and Kelly went out with only his dad’s rubber-soled slippers and a sweater as nod to the cold. He didn’t need anything else because as soon as he saw that dark mop of hair and that bright face emerge from the car, he had all the warmth he needed.

The hug wasn’t bad as a fire starter either, and neither was the kiss. It tasted of longing and cold weather and desperation, but also relief. It became Kelly’s mission to rout every last one of the shadows in his boyfriend’s eyes by the time they went to bed.

Which was one of the first driveway conversations he needed to have with Walter.

“Mom did this weird contained freak-out over where you were going to sleep. Normally she’d have you stay in my room in the sleeping bag, since we don’t have a spare room, but because we’re dating she feels like she shouldn’t. Then she said she felt ridiculous because she knows we sleep in the same room at school, and then she mostly went red and murmured about not wanting to have this conversation. The thing is, my room’s in the basement, and they’re all on the second floor, so my thought was to have you officially take the blow-up mattress in the TV room but pretty much spend the night in my room.”

Walter seemed oddly happy about this. “That’s so sweet. So old-fashioned. I’ll do whatever—I don’t want to upset your mom.”

“The thing is, I think this was what she kept trying to suggest, that we give her some window dressing so she can lie to herself easier.” He pulled Walter closer to him. “You’re coming to bed with me at least part of the night, though.”

Walter’s grin went a bit wicked. “Works for me,” he said, and kissed Kelly again, a different kind of desperate this time.

Kelly helped Walter bring things in from the car, pausing to introduce everyone on the first round, beaming as they hugged and seemed to like each other right off the bat. They got to chatting, so Kelly went back to the car to bring in another load—and he saw the food basket. And cooler.