49. Here’s To New Beginnings

49

HERE'S TO NEW BEGINNINGS

QUINN

33 DAYS 'TIL CHRISTMAS

Thanksgiving is tomorrow.

I park my car in the driveway and let out a sigh.

It's my first without Patrick.

To combat the sadness, I took a trip to the drugstore and picked up face masks and a couple of bottles of nail polish that caught my eye—a deep brown, a dark red, and a buttery yellow. Tonight, Veronica is going to come by, we're going to put on Carol (a seasonal comfort watch) and beautify ourselves.

With a reusable shopping bag swinging from one hand, I head for the mailbox, right as my phone starts ringing. It's Mom.

I've received a few texts from her since I returned but they've been brief, from which I can sense an upset she won't admit to. Strange that she's chosen now to call, but I'm not going to miss this.

"Mom, hey! Long time, no talk. What's happening with you?" I ask, keeping my tone light even if I'm hurt.

"Been busy. Work," she says. "Just calling to say happy Thanksgiving before I head up to the mountains with Pete."

"What mountains? Wait, who's Pete?" I ask.

"Oh, right." She clicks her tongue. "My boyfriend."

I lean up against the trunk of my car, setting the bag down on the driveway I salted this morning. There might be snow in the forecast, which I'm happy about. I miss the fluffy stuff. Just like I miss Mom. And I'm more than a little hurt she didn't tell me this sooner. "I didn't know you had a boyfriend."

"There's a lot you don't know as of late." Her tone is clipped.

"I'm sorry I didn't call." I don't add that I've been playing pretend in the land of sugarplums and elves to save Christmas because even if Veronica understood, the improbability here is too high. She'll think I'm making fun of her or something.

I can almost see her shrug and flip her hair over her shoulder like she's so blasé about it. "Yeah. Me, too. Same here."

The silence simmers between us for a second. "Where did you meet this Pete?" She doesn't even chuckle at the rhyme. She must be really pissed.

"The casino." Mom always had a habit of gravitating toward men who ruled the card tables or boasted assurance at the roulette wheel.

"How long have you been seeing him?" I ask. You can miss a lot when you fall off the face of the earth for nine months.

"Seventeen, maybe eighteen weeks?" Mom often relays the length of her relationships in weeks the way a new mother relays their infant's age. She thinks the higher the number, the better it sounds.

These men usually had slicked-back hair, worn leather jackets, and always smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, even when Mom claimed smokers were a deal breaker. They were everything my dad wasn't: freewheeling, partying, gambling men. It's like she never understood that luck on the casino floor usually meant unlucky in love.

Now it makes sense when I think about why I was inexplicably drawn to Patrick when we met in college outside of that clubhouse. He smelled like vodka and he was dressed like Santa and his phone was missing. On the outside, he appeared much like these card sharks my mom brought around the apartment—the masculine ideal I was programmed to want.

But as we got to know one another, Patrick's true nature un masked itself. His partying, lightly mysterious persona was not a feature of his programming, but rather a bug in his development. It was his way of letting loose, shedding his parents' disappointment over his path of study. Even if I often wondered how true their disapproval was.

The Patrick I started dating barely drank except socially and would rather go to a movie than a club. He was a handsome, stable decision-maker. I sighed with relief and promptly fell head-over-heels in love with him.

Maybe head-over-heels in love isn't a state you can stay in or try to get back to—too much blood rushing to the head all the time, dizzying. Maybe firmly-on-two-feet in love is mature love. The kind we need now.

"Why's it matter?" Mom asks, snapping me back to the conversation.

"A little soon to be going to his family Thanksgiving, no?" I ask without thinking.

"Not like you sent me an invite. I don't even know where you are."

"I'm in New Jersey. Home," I say, sounding salty in the reverb on her end. She must have me on speaker. I temper my voice before asking, "If I had invited you, would you have come?"

"What kind of question is that? Of course. As long as Pete could come, of course." Is Pete there, standing in our old kitchen eating a sandwich over the sink, listening in? That's how it feels.

"Are you sure?" I ask, harnessing some of the forwardness I found in the North Pole. "Because the last few years, the last several holidays, you've bailed."

"I don't bail. I have somewhere else to be." She's failing to spot that there is no difference. That "somewhere else to be" usually only materializes after the fact, after the plans have been made, but I don't want to blame her anymore. There are two people who are a part of this problem. We both have to want to find a solution.

"Mom," I say. "Be honest. The last major event I saw you at was my wedding, and even then, you sulked through the whole thing." I lift my left hand, once again mourning the place where my wedding ring used to be. Before, it felt like a bothersome anchor. Now I feel completely adrift without it. I wish we could split the difference.

"Where is this coming from?" she asks sharply. At least she hasn't denied anything.

I shake my head, unable to find words until suddenly I'm choked up. "It's coming from missing you," I croak.

There's silence and then finally: "Oh, my baby." I hear rustling, the sound of a chair scraping across linoleum, and footsteps down a carpeted hallway that I recognize too well from my childhood. "I don't even know what to say. I miss you, too."

"Then why don't you ever want to see me?" I ask. I wish we weren't having this conversation over the phone while I'm standing in my driveway. But I'm frozen here. Autumn wind gliding over my shoulders. Dead leaves rolling over my feet.

She takes a loud breath that crackles. "Because it hurts too much."

"Hurts? What hurts?" I ask, wanting desperately to understand.

"I had you when I was a teenager, Quinn. Barely an adult. I had plans to go to college and get a business degree. But a couple months after high school graduation I became a wife, and then a couple months after that I became a mother. Gran and Grandpa would've had it no other way. Everything changed for me so quickly," she says, saddened. "I loved you from the moment I found out I was going to have you. Don't mistake my words. I'm only trying to say that one night with your father irrevocably changed the path of my life. I didn't even know if I loved him. All I knew was that I needed to learn how to and fast so that I could be there for you."

"Mom," I say, as if that's worth anything in this moment. I wait patiently for her to continue.

"I wasn't good at it. I tried and tried and tried to make a happy home while I only grew unhappier, so when your father finally served me papers, I flung myself in the other direction." There's a sniffle. I can't tell if it's on her end of the line or mine. I realize now that every relationship is as delicate as a strand of dental floss. Two good tugs in opposing directions could snap the whole thing apart.

"It was me and you, my baby, against the world. That's how I liked it. They tell you in all the parenting books how to make sure your child grows up to be strong and independent, but I liked how you needed me too much. I liked that even in middle school you weren't embarrassed to hold my hand when we crossed the street or to go shopping with me at the mall and then suddenly high school happened and you came into your own. Then, you got into a great college and met this great man with this perfect, perfect family and I know this is selfish, Quinn, I know, but I didn't want to let you go," she says, breaking and somehow also healing my heart.

"I didn't go anywhere," I say reassuringly. "I'm still here."

"It didn't feel that way. It felt like I was being replaced. Again," she says with a sigh. I know she's talking about Dad. Regardless of whether she loved him or not, she depended on him. Her whole life she was told she had to. "But I'm sorry. To protect myself from hurt, I hurt you. That was never my intention. I hope you know that."

"I do," I say. Mom hardened, like Patrick did before we met. They performed "carefree" as if they were being paid to do so. I did the opposite. I was so afraid Patrick would hurt me by leaving that I performed "careful." Careful husband who never says no and is along for the ride.

Marriages aren't one person driving the sleigh and the other playing pillow-passenger in the sidecar.

Marriages are, as silly as it may seem, tandem bicycles. If you can't learn to pedal together, you'll end up tipping or crashing or worse.

"Good," she says, recovering. "Good. So, listen, do you have plans for Thanksgiving? Because if you don't, it's not too late for me to cancel. My car is out of commission but I'm sure I could take the bus up to you or—"

"No, Mom, don't rearrange your plans for me." I wipe a stray tear from my cheek. "I'm going to Veronica's house to celebrate with her mom and stepdad."

"Where's Patrick?"

I sigh quietly, wishing I could tell her the truth after all she just shared with me. "Still traveling," I say instead. I'll explain it all when the time is right. For now, I want this to be about us. Only us.

"That must be tough, my baby," she says. "Being apart like that around the holidays."

"It is." Those two words can't convey even the half of it.

"I'm sorry. I'll tell you what. I've got some sick days saved up I need to use before the end of the year. Why don't I come out for Christmas this year? We'll spend some time together."

I blink back new tears. "That sounds great."

Before she hangs up, she promises to call again when she's on the road back from Massachusetts when the cell service kicks back in. She tells me she loves me. I tell her the same.

Leaving my bag by the trunk, I go to the mailbox, expecting only bills and the odd Christmas card from those families who haven't gone entirely digital. My breath catches when I discover an envelope with no return address.

I don't even need to open it to know it's from the North Pole, from Patrick. The cinnamon scent wafts up off the postage.

My heart turns incandescent.

Inside the house, I sit at my desk in my bedroom, heart beating so hard you'd think I was about to learn government secrets. Which, I guess, being at the North Pole, I kind of did.

The envelope contains two pieces of paper. The first is a letter dated a few days ago:

Dearest Quinn,

My family may not be perfect, but there is one good thing I learned from them: Hargraves never give up.

I made a wish a long time ago, and I won't give up on it.

Not now. Not ever.

Trust in that.

All my love,

Patrick

The second paper is another letter. This one has the Casola's Christmas Village logo printed in the top right corner. It's from his birthday all those years ago, the letter he wrote to Santa. Only, it doesn't say: I wish for my degree like he'd jokingly said to me on the Kissing Bridge. Instead, it says:

Dear Santa,

I wish to love Quinn Muller forever.