“I packed the immersion blender in my suitcase,” Ana tells him.
He sweeps her into his arms and kisses her.
“Girls,” Ana says, still in his embrace. “Will you set up the tree? We’ll finish our grocery list and get the prep started. We have about an hour before the cab comes back.”
“I found us a restaurant,” Javier tells me. “A special Christmas Eve menu.”
“What tree?” I ask.
Mabel points to the box.
We carry it into the elevator together and ride up to the rec room. We’ll eat our Christmas dinner in there at the table, sit on the couches, and look at the tree.
“We can sleep in here,” I say. “And give your parents my room.”
“Perfect,” she says.
We find a place for the tree by the window and open the box.
“Where did you get this?” I ask her, thinking of the tall pines they’ve always gotten and covered with hand-painted ornaments.
“It’s our neighbor’s,” Mabel says. “On loan.”
The tree comes in pieces. We stand up its middle section and then stick on the branches, longer pieces at the bottom and shorter as we build up, tier by tier. All white tinsel, all covered in lights.
“Moment of truth,” Mabel says, and plugs it in. Hundreds of tiny bulbs glow bright. “It’s actually really pretty.”
I nod. I step back.
He would carry the boxes so carefully out to the living room. Open their lids to tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments. Apple cider and sugar cookies. A pair of tiny angels, dangling between his finger and thumb as he searched for the right branch. Something catches in my chest. Breathing hurts.
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper. “Now, that’s a tree.”
The restaurant is an Italian place, white tablecloths and servers in black ties. We are surrounded by families and laughter.
Ana chooses the wine, and the waiter comes back with the bottle.
“How many will be enjoying the Cabernet this evening?”
“All of us,” Javier says, sweeping his arm across the table as though the four of us were a village, a country, the entire world.
“Wonderful,” the waiter says, as though drinking laws don’t exist during the holidays, or perhaps have never existed at all.
He pours wine into all of our glasses, and we order soups and salads and four different pastas, and no dish is spectacular but everything is good enough. Ana and Javier lead the conversation, full of gentle teasing of Mabel and one another, full of anecdotes and exuberance, and afterward we have a cab take us to Stop & Shop and wait as we race through the aisles, grabbing everything on the list. Javier curses the selection of cinnamon, saying they don’t have the real stuff; and Ana drops a carton of eggs and they break with a tremendous thwack on the floor, yellow oozing out; but apart from that, we get everything they are looking for and ride, smushed in the cab with our groceries and the heat blasting, back to the dorm.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” I ask after we have gotten the bags of groceries unpacked in the kitchen.
“No,” Javier says. “I have it under control.”
“My dad is the boss tonight. My mom is the sous chef. Our job is to stay out of their way.”
“Fair enough,” I say. We step into the elevator but neither of us presses the number of my floor.
“Let’s go to the top,” I say.
The view must be the same as it was the first night we were up here, but it looks crisper and brighter, and even though we can’t hear Ana and Javier as they chop and stir and laugh, I feel that we are less alone.
But maybe it doesn’t have to do with Ana and Javier at all.
“When did you decide to do this?” I ask her.
“We thought you’d come home with me. That was our only plan. But when I realized that there was a good chance I wasn’t going to convince you, we figured out that we could do this.”
“Last night,” I say. “When you were on the phone . . .”
She nods. “We were planning it out. They wanted me to tell you, but I knew that if I did you might give in and go back before you were ready.” She holds her hand up to the window. “We all understand. It makes sense why you don’t want to go back yet.”
She takes her hand away but the imprint is still there, a spot of warmth on the glass.
“When I was waiting for my parents at the airport, I kept thinking of something I wanted to ask you.”
“Okay,” I say.
She’s quiet.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve just been wondering if there’s anyone here you’re interested in.”
She’s flushed and nervous, but trying to hide it.
“Oh,” I say. “No. I haven’t been thinking about things like that.”
She looks disappointed, but slowly, her expression changes.
“Let’s think about it now,” she says. “There must be someone out there.”
“You’re doing it again,” I say. “This is like the Courtney and Eleanor thing.”