“Is this a date?” I asked. “It’s Christmas.”
“It’s never not worked,” he said. A pause, and then he took my wrist and knocked my knuckles to the wooden door frame.
Next was Uncle John, with Lisa, then Bonnie with her parents and a macaroni salad heavy with mayonnaise.
John set up the bar, and for the rest of the night he played bartender, putting eggs into drinks: Golden Slippers, which are apricot brandy, chartreuse, and a yolk. The whites he saved for September Mornings: rum, brandy, lime juice, and grenadine. He was using real limes because he hated those squeeze bottles, and so a line was amassing for the drinks, out the kitchen and into the living room; John squeezed each lime individually, and one had to smile patiently if one wanted a good drink, because he was testy otherwise, as usual.
You carved the turkey and you carved the ham, and we drank John’s cocktails and you binge-drank Shirley Temples and, Dad, you were making fun of Mom’s affinity for reggae, which she blamed us for—she only got into it because we loved dancing to it, as babies—and Uncle John was talking angrily about his neighbors, who own cows, and Lisa was pushing her hand lightly on his arm as if to say, Easy now, and everybody was holding paper plates that were bending into parabolas with the weight of all the food.
And much later, after everybody is gone, and when it is just the four of us again, and we’ve dealt with all of the dishes, this is what you do: you turn the low doorknobs and we walk single file out the door, staying within sight of one another, in our light-colored clothes. “Testing, testing,” Linus says, over a walkie-talkie. “Roger that,” I respond. It’s after midnight by now, meaning it isn’t Christmas anymore. It’s an ordinary, regular night—and I prefer it, to be honest. The moon is doing something beautiful. Mom’s trailing you, clutching your little finger.
She pulls a peeled orange from her jacket pocket and hands it to Linus to distribute the segments.
“Mom’s brought an orange, Dad,” Linus says. “Do you copy?”
“I copy,” you say, then “Over and out,” and all of us follow your lead, one after the other, into the darkness: over and over and over. Out, out, out.