Luke said, “I should go work out. I had to cancel with my trainer today.”
“Not yet,” Mom said, and patted the chair next to her. “Let’s all talk about this for a second.”
He sat down and reached for her hand. I breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of their clasped fingers—whatever they’d heard hadn’t driven them further apart. “What did the doctor say?”
They looked at each other and then Mom said slowly, “She does think Jacob falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. But she also thinks he’s incredibly bright and that he can learn pretty much anything we want him to, with just a little bit of work.”
“Okay,” I said. I felt like I should have a bigger reaction to the news, but we’d been inching toward that possibility for so long that I guess deep down I’d already kind of accepted it. “It makes sense, right? What do you think, Luke?”
“You’ll be happy to know I listened quietly to the doctor.”
“Because you promised me?”
He nodded. “But also because you were right. It was time for me to shut up and listen. Plus I really liked her.”
I beamed at him. I felt like a proud parent. “And?”
“I told her I still don’t like the idea of labeling a two-year-old, and she said she completely understood and that the label didn’t matter anyway—the important thing was just to recognize that Jacob’s a little behind other kids his age and we need to help him catch up. Which I’m fine with.”
“Me too,” Mom said.
“Whatever it takes.” He brought Mom’s hand to his mouth for a swift kiss. “Can I go now?”
“You may go,” she said. “And thank you,” she whispered to me as he left the kitchen. “I don’t know what you said to him, but it made all the difference.”
“I have awesome powers of persuasion.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Speaking of which . . . can I persuade you to let me stay out past one tonight? I’ll just be at George’s. You know you can trust us.”
“Curfew’s midnight,” she said. “Same as always.” Grandma put a cup of tea in front of her and Mom nodded her thanks while Grandma sat down with her own cup.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m on vacation. And you should be proud of me for not sneaking home later than curfew without permission even though you’re usually asleep and don’t even notice what time I get home. I’m always honest with you. Which is why you can trust me. And it’s not like I want to go drinking or anything. I just want to hang out in George’s apartment and watch movies with him, and it’s so much nicer not to have to rush home early.”
“That’s all?” she said. “You’re just going to watch movies?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I used to tell my mother that, too,” she said, and the two of them looked at each other and laughed a little too loudly.
“Don’t worry,” Grandma said to her. “I already had the condom talk with her.”
“And I endured it without complaining,” I said. “For that alone I should get one night without a curfew.”
Mom laughed some more and gave in.
thirty-six
Crystal took the baby (and Megan, who never seemed to get any holiday off) back to her parents’ house in Boston for Thanksgiving, so Mom invited Michael and Aaron to have dinner with us.
We ate in the dining room, which we saved for big formal dinners—which meant we almost never used it. I don’t know about the adults’ end of the table, but Aaron, Jacob, and I had fun at ours. We piled mounds of mashed potatoes on our plates and sent cranberries crashing through them on skateboards made of turkey, while Aaron told me stories about life in the hotel—it sounded like he was basically an older, male version of Eloise, wheedling everyone who worked there to give him free food and drinks, making friends with the other guests, and driving the staff crazy. He was having fun, he said.
“I’m over all the drama,” he told me right after he had stuck green beans in the corners of his mouth and pretended to be a walrus to amuse Jacob, who just stared at him, then looked away again, unimpressed. Aaron tossed the beans back onto his plate. “I’m avoiding it in the future.”
“Make it your New Year’s resolution,” I suggested.
“That’ll be one of them,” he said. “Sticking close to good friends I can trust—that’s another.”
I fluttered my hands to my chest in an exaggerated You mean me? kind of way and he grinned and raised his wineglass to me. We were both drinking wine, but I was still on my first glass and he was on his second. Or third.
The plates had all been cleared when George and Jonathan arrived—they’d had dinner with the Nussbaum clan first, but had been invited to join us for dessert.
I watched from a distance as Luke got up to shake George’s hand and Mom reached up to give him a hug and a kiss, and I felt as lucky as people were always telling me I was.
Jonathan circled around the table and reached me first. He leaned over to give me a kiss and whispered in my ear, “I want you to know I don’t approve of this at all. You’re way too good for him.” He cuffed me on the shoulder and nodded in Aaron’s direction. “Hello,” he said coldly. Apparently (and probably not coincidentally) he shared his brother’s dislike of Aaron.
Jacob stretched up his arms and Jonathan scooped him up. “All right then,” he said, and carried Jacob over to the adults’ end of the table, where he sat down next to Luke, arranging Jacob comfortably on his lap.
George said hello to all the adults before coming to our end of the table, so he reached us a minute after his brother.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and rested his hand on the back of Jacob’s former seat. “Mind if I sit here?”