“Is this even going to fit through the door?” Caroline groans as we stand side by side, yanking on the bottom of the tree, struggling to pull all ten thousand tips through the narrow opening.
“Of course it’s going to—”
Thwack!
One of the branches manages to squeeze through and smacks me right in the face. A second later, the tree, me, and Caroline tumble through my grandmother’s entryway.
“Ow,” I grumble, rubbing my forehead while Caroline giggles away next to me. “It’s not funny! Could’ve damaged the ol’ moneymaker.”
She laughs and opens her mouth to say something before snapping it closed and standing, dusting herself off as she looks away.
Ten steps forward, nine steps back. Still, I can work with that.
After we manage to get the tree into the living room, I run down to the basement to get the stand and the ornaments, but Caroline hovers by the door at the top.
“Still scared?” I call up to her, gazing around at all of Grams’s very unthreatening, carefully labeled boxes.
She calls back a very unconvincing “What? No!”
Caroline was never a fan of anything spooky. Basements, scary movies, and ghost stories were a big no thanks. I remember she held my hand the whole way through a corn maze one Halloween because Levi told her a bunch of kids lived there, and they were looking for someone to sacrifice to their demon god. Which… come to think of it, is actually just the plot of Children of the Corn, but we didn’t know that at the time.
I get back to scanning the boxes, each one sloppily scrawled on in permanent marker.
Photos.
Dishes and Crystal.
Diner Paperwork.
Callie and Theo Clothes.
My heart sinks at that last one. I can’t believe she still has my parents’ stuff down here. She should’ve dumped this box ages ago. If there’s one thing I know about Theo and Callie, it’s that they’ll never come back for what they left behind.
Nope, not going there. I swing my head up and onward, and my eyes finally land on the box labeled Christmas Ornaments on the top shelf, just out of reach. I look around for a stepladder or something, but there isn’t one.
“You find it?” Caroline calls down to me.
“You want the good news or the bad news?” I call back.
“Good?”
“I found it.”
“Bad?”
“I need you to come help me get it.”
Caroline grimaces before slowly poking a foot out, the wooden step creaking as she cautiously puts her weight on it. She creeps down the rest of the steps at a glacial pace, head on a swivel.
“Don’t worry, Pennywise just left.”
She slaps my arm as she steps off the last stair. “Shut up.”
I rub where she hit as I point to the box on the top shelf, just above us. “I think we can get it if I give you a boost.”
“Give me a…?”
I stoop down and pick her up around her legs. Caroline lets out a gasp and grabs ahold of my shoulders to steady herself. To my surprise, I almost gasp too, but it’s at how nice it is to be this close to her after so long. It feels strangely normal in a way I didn’t know I was missing. But even if I wanted to, I don’t have time to think about it further, because the past four years of staying out late and generally taking shitty care of my body tell me that I have about six and a half seconds before I drop her smack onto the concrete floor.
“Get… the… box,” I manage to grunt out, and she complies, cautiously reaching up to grab it off the shelf.
Once she has it in hand, I let her body slide slowly through my grip until we’re face-to-face, her feet touching the ground, the cardboard box between us.
“A warning would’ve been nice,” she says. I notice her cheeks are faintly red, making the freckles on her nose stand out even though it’s winter.
While I’m sure it’s just from anger at being scooped up without notice, a small part of me wonders if being this close to me makes Caroline Beckett nervous too. If she can feel the ghost of the childhood crush I had on her all those years ago.
God, I hope not. Focus, Arden.
I take the box from her grip. “Let’s get the tree done before Grams gets home.”
I head up the steps as Caroline squeaks out a “Wait for me!” and runs to catch up before the basement monster can grab her by the ankles.
For the next hour, we get the tree set up, adding a red-and-white quilted skirt that my great-grandma made and a string of ancient incandescent lights. I make a mental note to upgrade her to twinkle LEDs instead of these fire hazards. Then we dive into the box of dusty ornaments, which clearly haven’t been touched since I left Barnwich. My heart fills with guilt just like last night when I pulled into her driveway and there wasn’t a single decoration up.
“You okay?” Caroline asks, dipping her head toward me.
“Yeah.” I force a smile and shake it off.
We begin to hang each ornament that Grams carefully collected throughout her life, from frosted pinecones on a string, to a handprint of my mom’s from when she was a baby, and even a small snow globe of Seoul that she brought with her when she emigrated as a little girl.
As we move through the box, we’re both pretty quiet until I begin softly humming Christmas music and Caroline can’t help but join in.
Eventually I hear Caroline chuckle as she digs into the bottom of the box. When she emerges, she’s holding up an ornament with a picture of us from two years before I left, just a few short months before I first started realizing I had a crush on her.
“Cuuuute,” I say, plucking it out of her hands. In the photo, we’re bundled up in our winter jackets, our noses red from the cold. “Your earmuffs were adorable, but I always loved that beanie you made me.”
Beige with a blue stripe. Very cozy.
“It was too big,” Caroline says.
“Yeah, because you used your brother’s big-ass head for the measurements,” I say, leaning past her to hang the ornament on a high branch next to a figurine of Rudolph, my arm brushing lightly against hers.
“If you would’ve held on to it, it’d probably fit your ‘big-ass head’ perfectly now.” She laughs.
“Who says I didn’t keep it?” I ask, my heels landing back on the ground.
“Please. I don’t think it would exactly match your Saint Laurent coat.”
“Yeah, it probably wouldn’t,” I reply, but smile to myself as the two of us hang the final few ornaments. When the box is completely empty, I plug in the lights and we plunk down on the ground just in front of the glowing tree, admiring our handiwork.
We stare at it in silence for a moment before I glance over at her, taking in her face illuminated in the yellow lights, the straight line of her nose, the fullness of her lips, her strawberry-blond hair over one shoulder.
And all at once, I feel it. The warm, cozy, almost euphoric sense of nostalgia for a time in my life that I’ve all but forgotten. The feeling of being close to someone who once meant everything to me in a place that looks and sounds and smells like… home.
It stirs up a memory and gives me an idea.
I hop up and head over to the buffet, where Grams keeps her ancient stereo. I flip through all the CDs until I find what I’m looking for. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree by Brenda Lee.
I pop it in and turn to face Caroline. I smile at her, but she looks skeptically at me while we wait for something to play. As the first notes play out, her eyes widen immediately.
“Come on,” I say, reaching for her hand.
“Arden, I don’t remember the steps,” she says, pulling her hand away from mine.
“I don’t believe you.” I grab her arm this time and pull her onto her feet and into the open space in the living room.
“I don’t feel like it.” She tries again, but I’m already starting without her.
“Right. Left. Left. Right. Twirl!” I sing above the music, going right into the dance routine we made up and performed at the diner Christmas party every year.
“Arden, stop!” she says in a loud, firm voice, jerking hard out of my grip before taking a few steps away from me. “I don’t want to do a fucking dance with you. Okay?”
“Oh. Okay,” I reply, taken aback. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll say in the article that we did the whole routine.” She sits down on the rug with her back to me. I take a second to catch my breath, reminding myself that we aren’t those kids anymore. I’ve made sure of that.
I head off to the kitchen to give her some space and check my phone, finding a voicemail from Lillian.
“Just checking in. Making sure Caroline is actually writing that article and you two aren’t just screwing around all day. It’s not too often Cosmo lets an eighteen-year-old from nowhere write for them. I don’t want any more surprises, Arden. Make sure it gets done right.”
I pocket my phone and roll my eyes at that before returning to the living room with a circular blue tin of Royal Dansk cookies. I plop down onto the carpet beside Caroline and hand her the tin.
“Thanks,” she says, taking it and then prying it open. “Oh, yum.” She laughs and holds the tin out for me to see.
“Aw, shit. They got to Grams, too.” I take it from her and dig through the cookie tin, finding it filled with thread, needles, and miscellaneous buttons, not cookies. “God, is there a certain age that old ladies just have to turn these into sewing kits?”
Caroline shrugs. “I think it just happens naturally as we age.”
I chuckle and shake my head, and then we sit there for a few minutes as time slowly melts away the tension in the room.
“You still gotta ask me a question,” I say, trying to stay in business mode now, thinking about Lillian’s message. The look in Caroline’s eyes changes as she pulls out her notepad and flips through the pages. Very serious.
I bite my lip, trying to stifle a laugh as she clears her throat.
“You’re a successful actress with a long list of credits in a number of smash hits, and half the young girls in the US look up to you.” Her eyes, heavy with irony, flick up to meet mine for just a sec. “Who do you look up to?”
“Ooh. That’s a good one.”
I lean back on my hands, thinking about all my favorite actors, the ones I try to emulate, the ones who’ve made me want to be a part of a movie like Bianchi’s. “Oh, man. It’s gotta be Toni Collette. For sure. She turns every role into one that you wish was yours. She’s so tal—”
“Arden,” Caroline interrupts, and I look over to find her shaking her head. “Not someone whose career you want. I mean someone you look up to as a person. This article is supposed to be more personal, right? So personally, who do you look up to?”
I chew my lip as I think, and my gaze lands on a picture on the fireplace mantel of me and Grams at her diner. I’m sitting up on the counter while she flips pancakes on the griddle. Of course. Why didn’t I name her first? “Grams. She grew up in the South in a first-generation Korean American family. Worked so hard for years with very little education to save up and open her own diner. She kept going when the love of her life died the week it opened. And then she practically raised me when her daughter couldn’t be bothered.” Another pang of guilt stabs me in the chest for every day she’s spent here without me, and all the days she will spend here without me, after all the days she gave up for me.
I let out a long exhale, feeling Caroline’s eyes on me.
“That’s admirable. That’s the kind of person half the US should look up to,” I add.
“Then why don’t you honor her legacy if you look up to it so much?”
I stare back at the tree as I try to speak, but all that comes out is a stutter of sounds. How could I possibly explain to her everything that has happened in the last four years? That I don’t even remember saying yes to my first part in LA. That I just remember everything happening all at once, getting Lillian and a schedule and a plane ticket to the promise of a better life. That the moment I stepped off the plane in LA, I found out that to get what I always wanted, I had to turn into something I didn’t really want to be, and my parents didn’t even attempt to protect me from it. And that by the time I was old enough to do it myself, it was too late, because now I needed the numbing and the distractions. She’d probably just call bullshit before I even got a word out.
“I wanted… I—I want to,” is all I can tell her, because it’s the one thing I know to be true. “That’s why I want a role like this, one that matters.”
I’m worried she’s going to press for more, but when I look over at her, at the reflection of the lights in her warm brown eyes, she just nods and flips her notepad shut, like she understands that it’s all I can give her right now. I guess in all this time that I’ve been gone and with how angry she’s been since I got back, I forgot that she can read me perfectly. She knows exactly when to push, when to ask the hard questions, and also when to let up. She always has.
There’s a loud crash and the door bursts open, making both of us jump.
Grams stands frozen in the doorway, slowly shaking her head. “Ah, shit. Jim Swanson was bitching about someone stealing a tree earlier tonight. I had my suspicions when he said it looked an awful lot like my Volvo.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Barely here two days and you two are already getting into trouble.”
Caroline and I share a guilty smile, and I wonder if she’s remembering when we replaced a hundred dollars’ worth of Tom’s cigarette stash at the diner with candy cigarettes when we wanted him to quit. Or when we replaced all of Miles’s stocking stuffers with sticks of deodorant. Or when Levi got his license and we somehow convinced him that stop signs with white outlines were optional, and he almost killed us all.
Okay, that one was a little too far, but we were like twelve.
I hop up and throw an arm over Grams’s shoulder, innocently leading her over to the tree.
“Could be a coincidence,” I say, and she snorts, giving me a look before turning her gaze back to the tree.
“You like it?” I ask after she’s had some time to take it in. She nods, giving me a small smile.
“I like it.” She pats my side. “Thank you.” Her gaze flicks past me to Caroline, my tree-stealing accomplice, the gratitude extending to her, too.
“It’s almost eight o’clock, Caroline Beckett. You better be getting home for pizza night unless you plan on committing any other felonies.”
Right. Fridays are pizza nights in the Beckett household. My stomach growls at the thought of their deep-dish pepperoni, and I make a mental note to stop by Taste of Italy and pick one up for me and Grams.
She shouldn’t have to cook again after her shift.
Caroline smiles and stands as Grams slips out from under my arm to give her a hug.
“I’ll drive you home,” I say when they pull apart, holding out her jacket from the hook by the door.
I expect her to resist, but she takes it and nods. “Okay.” She brushes past me, smelling like floral shampoo and stolen pine needles, and my head turns almost automatically to follow the scent. When I swivel back to say goodbye, Grams is giving me a look, her eyebrow raised.
I roll my eyes at her and grab my jacket and keys, but her look lingers in my mind. I hate how I’ve barely been here two days and Caroline Beckett somehow already has me feeling like despite what I’ve told myself, a part of me has been waiting all this time to come home.
Not home, I remind myself. This is why I can’t get too close, too cozy. I only have twelve more days here… and then I go back to LA. That’s home now.