Page 94 of Only After We Met

“Yeah. The cheese is melting on it right now.”

“Spaghetti for Christmas?”

“I know it’s your favorite. I thought you’d be happy.”

I blinked, almost uncomfortable. Tense.

“Thanks, Mom.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed her quickly on the head. “I’m going to take my things upstairs, okay?”

“Sure. There’s still ten minutes.”

I climbed the spiral staircase slowly to the second floor. The family photos were hanging on the wall in chronological order. First came those of her and Dad before I came along. Young, good-looking, with clothes from long ago, and then on their wedding day. Soon after that, I appeared. Barely a year old, in my father’s arms, while he looked at the camera with a cigarette between his slightly downturned lips. Me on a bike, a little older; I could still remember how they taught me to ride it on the streets of that subdivision. I took a deep breath. Birthdays: seven, ten, and twelve, always with a smile when the button on the camera clicked to immortalize that moment in front of a cake covered in candles. My mother standing next to me on graduation day. Dad with an arm around me in front of the car they gave me for my twentieth birthday.

I rested my shoulder against the doorframe, unable to walk inside my room. It looked exactly as Ginger had guessed it would in her email more than a year ago.

Ginger… I didn’t want to think about her either.

Lately, I hadn’t wanted to think about anything.

I noticed on the shelves the models that Dad and I had put together when I was still a kid. They were still keeping my room clean, that was obvious; there wasn’t a single grain of dust to be seen. Ships, monuments, an airplane. Models frozen in time. All those hours invested. What a waste.

I heard my mother calling me down for lunch. I left my bags on the floor and walked back to the kitchen. On the big table, which used to be full of friends, family, and neighbors on every holiday, there were now just two glasses and two plates of steaming spaghetti. But after three Christmases alone, it was perfect.

“Delicious,” I said after taking a bite.

“I still remember how you like it with the onions crunchy.”

“It hasn’t been so long, has it?”

“I mean…three years is pretty long, Rhys.”

I looked across the table at her. Closely. Her cheeks were more sunken than they had been the last time, in New York. And she had more wrinkles. Were her eyes a little shrunken, maybe? I wasn’t sure. Can eyes shrink? Around her neck was the gold chain I helped my father pick out as a birthday present years ago; she never took it off. It was thin and had a blue teardrop mother-of-pearl pendant she fidgeted with when she was nervous.

Just as she used to, she looked at me nervously. “When are you going to finally sit down and talk with him?”

“Mom, don’t ruin the meal,” I responded.

“I’m serious, Rhys. The years are passing…”

“I know. And they’ll keep passing. I have nothing to say to him.” I swallowed, but that didn’t make the knot in my throat disappear, so I grabbed my glass of water and took a sip. “Don’t look atme like that. I promised you I’d call you every week, and I have.”

“Yeah, great. That doesn’t mean…”

“Mom…” I shook my head and sighed.

I didn’t want to talk about him. Let alone with her. I was keeping my part of the deal, even if I didn’t know why. Maybe because I was scared. Maybe because it was easier that way. Maybe because I didn’t want to think about the wick that one day caught fire and made everything explode. I’d fucked up, I knew. I’d acted like a spoiled brat, an idiot, running away when my parents needed me most. But he…he had broken me.

He had cut me adrift.

And I was still lost in that sea.

And there was the issue of pride.

Pride. His, mine.

Pride that blinds a person, that sends them into a rage, that makes them stay away for years waiting for anI’m sorry, for some words from the other person that will bring them relief, not realizing that they want the same. And time passes. Time buries us. And underneath it, buried in some deep, dark pit, we forget how to return to the surface.

There was only one point of connection for us. Her. My mother. I thought of this as I looked at her, memorizing her aging face, the way she cut her spaghetti because she couldn’t stand to get tomato sauce on the corners of her lips. She had always been the nexus between Dad and me. The center that held us together.