“You’renervous?” I peer over at him, surprised. “You look completely chill.”
“Chef face,” he explains. “I’ve mastered looking chill on the outside while losing my shit on the inside.”
I wrap my hand around his, where it rests on my knee. “Want to tell me?” I ask.
“First big holiday after being divorced,” he says. “I only saw Mia for a couple hours this morning, and now I’m showing up at my parents’ place without her.”
He swallows thickly. I lean across the console and set my head on his shoulder. I don’t have words of comfort. I can’t imagine how awful it feels to spend the holiday away from your child.
“I miss her,” he says. “And it feels wrong, to be without her. All of this, first-time stuff, after divorce, it feels… weird.”
“Yeah.” I stare out the window. “It does.”
“There’s another feeling,” he says. “I don’t know exactly what it is. I feel sad. And a little guilty because I’m also… relieved?Thissucks. But this time last year sucked, too. I was miserable. Jen was miserable. We were still hiding that from everybody, putting on aneverything’s fine!performance, even though we both knew we were headed for divorce. I felt so fucking lonely, carrying that inside me, no one else knowing. It was awful.”
My mind drifts to Ethan’s and my last Thanksgiving. He flew to his parents’ home in D.C., and I stayed home because I was going to be working all day Friday and Saturday, in preparation for and then during Small Business Saturday at The Bookshop. I FaceTimed my parents with Argos on my lap and wished them Happy Thanksgiving, and caught a peek at the spread of Thanksgiving classics filling the table, my extended family milling around in the background. I didn’t want to be there, with a bunch of people I wasn’t close to, in a home that wasn’t the one I’d grown up in. But I didn’t want to be alone, either.
When I hung up, I curled myself around Argos and cried until Lauren called me from her sister’s in St. Louis, a little drunk and talking very fast as she explained I was her phone-a-friend for family trivia, and she had ten seconds to name the third sister inLittle Women.
I smile, remembering her yelling, after I told her, “That’sit! I knew she was an anemic invalid played by Claire Danes, but Icouldn’t remember her name for the life of me,” before she bellowed even louder, “IT’S BETH! How do you likethat, Carl!”
Carl, Lauren’s brother-in-law, to whom, when he asked for Lauren’s blessing to marry Gina, Lauren said no one would ever be good enough for her baby sister. Carl, whom Lauren secretly adores, because in response, he told her she was right, but he wanted to spend the rest of his life trying to be.
I feel a pang of sadness—missing Lauren; wishing I had a family I felt like I belonged to; grieving, as silly as it sounds, the home I left Ethan, which I loved to decorate for the holidays. It isn’t mine to decorate anymore, and it never will be ever again.
And then, weaving through that sadness for what’s gone, what never was, the thinnest thread of hope—for a future that I will one day look back from, to a past that is this moment, the moments since the divorce, the moments ahead, and maybe then, that past will be something I remember with pride, contentment, maybe even happiness.
I thread my fingers through Alex’s and squeeze tight.
“Bittersweet,” I tell him. “That’s what that feeling is.”
He glances my way, then draws my hand up, pressed to his cheek. “Bittersweet,” he says. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“Um.” I stare, dumbfounded, at the banner stretched across the doorway leading to his parents’ kitchen.
HAPPY DAY, THALEX!
Alex stares at it, too, unblinking, as he mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
Before we can unpack the banner any further, a literal dozen people descend on us. Alex makes introductions over thegrowing buzz of voices. Lydia, his mom. Nick, his dad. Aunts, uncles, a handful of cousins whose names fly by me, his sisters, Sophia, Ariana (Ari), and Catalina (Lina), whose names I’m confident I’ll remember but not which faces they belong to.
I’m hugged, kissed on the cheek, spun around, hugged again, and oohed and aahed over. It isa lot.
Alex lets out a shrill whistle, startling everyone into taking a step back. “Let her breathe!”
His mom smacks his arm, muttering something in Italian under her breath that would make me nervous it was critical, if it weren’t for the warm, pleased smile playing on her mouth as she looks at me. She’s short and curvy, with caramel-brown eyes and Alex’s dark, thick hair threaded with white piled up on her head. Her apron has a picture of Mia in her little soccer uniform, tiny cleated foot propped on a soccer ball, then below it,Mia’s #1 Fan.
I want her to hug me again already.
“Welcome,” his dad says, clasping my hand in his. He’s a smidge taller than me, a smidge shorter than Alex, his hair silver and styled short, parted neatly. Alex has his deep-blue eyes but not much else. He smiles, inspecting me. “Theadora,” he says, in a thick accent I can’t place. “GoodGreekname. LikeAlexander.”
I dart a glance at Alex, whose eyes widen. “Oh my god, Dad—”
“Enough with theBig Fat Greek Weddingshtick,” Alex’s mom says, taking my hand from his.
“I’m sorry,” Nick says, the faux Greek accent vanished. He winks. “Great to meet you, Thea. Welcome.”
I smile, remembering what I told Alex when he described his dad that first gelato night, what Alex told me. I was right, and he was, too. I like his dad already.