How to End a Love Story(40)
“I do,” she says.
“Okay,” he says softly. “I’ll be there.”
Twelve
Christmas in their mostly agnostic Chinese household has become a familiar mishmash of traditions. Every year, Helen wakes up at eight a.m. with the sun, to the sound of porcelain plates and bowls moving downstairs. As she brushes her teeth and washes her face, the smell of this morning’s tang floats upstairs—some warming blend of bone broth, jujubes, and ginger.
By the time she comes downstairs, her mother has set aside a quick breakfast for them to eat whenever they wake up. This year, it’s steamed and salted taro root, already peeled and waiting in a thin plastic wrapper. Helen has never actually woken up early enough to see Mom eat on Christmas morning—she’s already mopping the floors.
Helen helps tidy up the living room and dusts the framed photos above the fireplace. Something always twists in her stomach when she reaches the single framed photo of her with Michelle. They’re in middle school, at the peak of both their awkward phases, and wearing bright neon snowsuits for a random ski trip they took with Mom and Dad’s work friends. They look happy and nothing like themselves—Helen doesn’t think they ever went skiing again and those work friends eventually faded from their lives like so much background noise.
They don’t have stockings or wreaths or any decorations like that—she remembers going to another friend’s house in December and being awed at the feeling of stepping into a Hallmark Christmas card. At their own house, Christmas is confined to a single room by the front door—they put up a fake tree they bought at Target twenty years ago and decorate with the same plastic ornaments every season.
Still, there’s a festive feeling in the air when she gets the red tablecloth out from the basement and helps Mom expand their dining room table to accommodate more guests.
Her own contribution comes in the form of a mulled cider this year, which she brews in a Crock-Pot according to the recipe that Tom from the writers room emailed her. She puts on the “Yule Log” broadcast and listens to Christmas music over the new speaker system her parents bought last Black Friday. Dad vacuums all the carpets while Mom puts a roast duck in the oven. When Helen opens the fridge, it’s full of frozen tiramisu from their nearby Costco.
Sometime around three p.m., the first of her parents’ friends arrive, holding dishes whose names Helen has never learned but that have become familiar enough that she’s made up her own for them—that black-ear mushroom dish everyone likes, the flowery greens with the good dark sauce, the thin clear spaghetti with the stripey green vegetables and minced pork.
Everyone greets her and gives her a hongbao—a red envelope stuffed with crisp new bills—at the door and Mom nudges her to remind Helen to say thank you, as if she’s still twelve years old. It occurs to Helen that she’s getting to an age where it’s maybe embarrassing to still be accepting these cash envelopes—surely her parents were in their early thirties when they started distributing them to their own friends’ kids.
Sometimes the other parents will bring their kids with them—kids who are, at this point, full-grown adults like Helen. This year it’s Theo Jiao, in his third year of a post-residency fellowship at—some teaching hospital; Helen tuned out when everyone started saying “med school” more than once in the conversation. Inevitably, there’s the moment when the dinner conversation turns into a humble-bragging competition between parents—“Helen is so busy all the time with her TV show, she never calls anymore.” “Theo isn’t sleeping enough, he’s overworked at his cardiology fellowship”—and then the not-so-subtle joking-haha-not-really part of the evening when they wonder why Helen and Theo don’t just date each other and get married and have babies already.
After dinner Dad turns on the TV and the grown-ups (Helen still thinks of them as grown-ups) all chatter idly while she and Theo watch Titanic.
“That’s cool they’re making a TV show out of your books,” Theo says. “I remember you were always reading at these things when we were kids. My mom donated your books to our local library.”
Helen feels bad now for not paying more attention to Theo’s residency talk.
“That’s really nice of her,” she says. “My parents are proud of you too. They sent me photos when you graduated med school.”
Helen wonders if Theo is actually single or if he’s got a girlfriend waiting for him to call after this is all over. Theirs was always a friendship of convenience—someone to talk to during these endless Chinese family gatherings, someone who understood this world without needing explanations. It probably would be easier if they would just fall in love, and Helen remembers vaguely a period when they were teenagers, when she thought she might have a crush on him and practiced her flirting with him. It never came to anything, though—maybe knowing their parents wanted it so badly sapped it of any real potential.
Theo checks his phone and Helen takes that as a sign that it wouldn’t be rude to check hers as well. There’s a string of Merry Christmas texts, from her YA author group chat and from the Ivy Papers writers room, which is currently litigating an ugly-sweater-off happening at Owen’s family Christmas. She sends a festive emoji to the group chat and votes for Owen’s uncle. Her phone dings, and it’s a text from Grant, to her individually—