The Christmas Orphans Club(33)
I always pictured myself dating a musician, someone as passionate about music as I am. Not a frontman, but maybe a drummer or a bassist. Someone who wasn’t in it for the girls or the glory, but the craft. David couldn’t be further from that. Last week I heard him singing the Stanley Steamer jingle in the shower and he once asked me for a six-letter word to answer the crossword clue: Former boybander heralding a “Sign of the Times.”
“He’s Boy Scout cute,” Priya remarked when she caught him sneaking out of my bedroom the morning after our second date. And she was right. He’s the kind of boy next door handsome that has old ladies chatting him up in the grocery checkout line. I didn’t think that would do it for me; I pictured myself with someone tattooed and broody. But, somehow, just about everything about David does it for me.
A knock on the doorframe startles me and I clutch the paperback I was leafing through to my chest. When I turn around, David’s leaning against the wall with a small smile on his lips. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say back, feeling shy having been caught prowling around his bedroom.
“What are you doing up here?” he asks. “I looked all over the house for you.”
“Just being a creep,” I admit.
“Well, if we’re admitting creepy things, is it weird that I like seeing you in here? I didn’t exactly have any girls up here in high school. There’s a real wish fulfillment to this.” He looks me up and down.
I flush at his assessment. If his parents weren’t downstairs, I’d think about pulling him down on the bed, but instead I settle for crossing the room and giving him a chaste kiss. Nothing we’d be embarrassed about if his parents walked in.
“Should we go back downstairs before we’re missed?” I ask.
“No, let’s stay a minute. I could use a breather, too. I know they can be a lot. It means so much to me that you’re here today.”
He pulls me into his chest and I let myself sag against him, resting my head on his shoulder. I inhale the smell of his deodorant and the sandalwood and leather scent of his cologne. That’s all it takes for something in my chest to loosen. It feels like I can breathe for the first time all day. I might not have preschool recs to trade with Jen and Zoe or opinions on cryptocurrency or football, but I realize I’m glad to be here, too. Because this is where David is, and these are the people he loves most. And I want them to love me, too.
* * *
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?The dinner table is magazine spread worthy. After retiring as the local middle school’s vice principal, June spent last summer taking an eight-week course at the Culinary Institute of America outside Poughkeepsie, and today is her recital. She flits around the table filling glasses and cutting turkey into bite-sized pieces for the grandchildren.
“So, David,” Jen says once everyone is settled, “when are you going to put a ring on Hannah’s finger?” She takes a sip of her wine to hide her self-satisfied smile as the side conversations grind to a halt so the rest of the family can hear his answer to the question they’re all wondering, but only Jen is bold enough to ask.
“Well . . . ,” David sputters as he glances around the table for someone to save him.
Nate claps him on the back. “C’mon, Jen, maybe he’s waiting to do it at Christmas and now you’ve ruined the surprise.”
“Mom is knitting Hannah her own stocking,” Adam says with a knowing tone.
It’s clear his older brothers are eager for David to join their ranks as husbands and fathers. It would be cute; except I suddenly feel like I’m in the midst of one of those dreams when you’re called to the front of the class to give a speech you didn’t prepare for, and, oh yeah, you’re not wearing pants either, as everyone at the table looks back and forth between me and David. I briefly wonder if it would look suspicious if I excused myself for the bathroom and let the Becker clan sort this out among themselves.
“Leave him alone,” David’s father says in the tone he uses to quiet a classroom of rowdy high schoolers.
“You know I was teasing you, Davey,” Jen says as she tops off her wineglass. “I’m just trying to help Hannah out! I’m sure she’s getting impatient. I know I would be.” She flashes me a wink like we’re on the same team.
Jen reminds me of my own sister. Tanned, toned Jennifer with the perfect blond highlights was a corporate lawyer when she married Adam. Now she stays home with her two kids and brings the same competitive spirit to being the perfect wife and mother, as if she’s on some elusive partner track at the firm of Mrs., Mom, and Homemaker.
For a while, it looked like Brooke was heading down a less conventional path. After the stock market crashed in 2008, and Lehman Brothers along with it, Brooke took her half of the money from the sale of our childhood home on some quarter-life Rumspringa, globetrotting and partying, probably relieved to be free of the responsibility of “taking care of me.”
She returned a year later with Spencer, a fellow backpacker she met at a Full Moon Party in Phuket. I rolled my eyes when she insisted I come down from Boston the Thanksgiving of my junior year to meet him. I came, begrudgingly, when she pulled out the big guns: “You’re the only family I have.”
We ate turkey sandwiches from the deli downstairs from Brooke’s Upper East Side apartment while Spencer lectured us on the superiority of Japanese sushi relative to its American counterpart and how I must get myself to Angkor Wat before it’s ruined by tourism, like he was somehow exempt from tourist status.