How We Ricochet by Faith Gardner

Author:Faith Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Nine

The weather outside is frightful, but this snowflake-patterned A-line dress is SO delightful. Holiday print in an icy-blue color that does you all the favors? Check. Dainty, detailed lace collar and sleeves? Check. Cotton sateen that warms like a dream? This dress checks all December’s boxes and then some. Boasting a full petticoat, you will feel like the Snow Queen of the Nutcracker Ball! $399.

I wake up, pull on my festive dress, pen my lips with red lipstick. It’s Christmas morning and the world is supposed to sparkle. All the elements are there—Elvis croons on the stereo, Mom cranked the living room’s space heater, and the smell of pancakes fills the air. (Mom cooks once a year: this is it.) But when I pull back my paisley curtain and look outside, the world looks the same: rained on, sleepy, a woman on a phone walking her dog, another woman in a duct-taped poncho with a shopping cart filled with cans digging through a recycling bin at the curb. Where’s she going, what does she celebrate? Why am I here and she’s there? Shandra Pensky’s picture comes to my mind, with a startled pang—her mourning family. Michael Lee’s mother, Brandi, without a son this year. It seems sometimes a charade that we continue celebrating in the face of relentless tragedy. How dare we? But then . . . what else is there to do?

I snap a selfie and hit send.

Merry Christmas, if you’re celebrating, I text Michael. Otherwise . . . merry normal day!

You’re adorable, he texts back. Thank you! I needed that!

He returns the favor with a selfie of him and his dog. Jackpot. I zoom in on the background, hoping to study the books on the bookshelf for . . . I guess, clues? But I can’t read their spines. I see a photograph of what looks like Michael and Joshua as children.

I FaceTime with Zoe, who’s in Hawaii on her annual family Christmas vacation. They’ve all been drinking mimosas and are raucously playing Monopoly. Zoe and her brothers don matching Christmas onesies, which is both cute and kind of disturbing. She passes me around to her family and I say hi, and then Zoe shuts herself into her room. She has been there three days, and there are piles of clothes, overflowing shopping bags, and an inexplicable giant stuffed kangaroo wearing several leis on the floor. As she talks to me, she gesticulates so wildly her mimosa keeps spilling. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“Also, he smelled weird,” she continues, telling me why she broke up with the guy after the guy she introduced on that call. “Like bananas when they get spotty. And he never seemed like he was listening, even when he was. It’s hard to explain.”

While Zoe’s less picky in terms of finding a mate, she quickly finds about ten thousand reasons why they aren’t right for her long-term, and moves on. So I guess she is picky in the end. I’m relieved to see that, even though she’s living thousands of miles away and getting educated, she’s exactly the same.

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