“DON’T THINK I won’t tickle-torture you,” Via said from where she reclined on Fin’s tiny balcony that overlooked a sliver of Prospect Park. It was December and freezing, so both women were in full outdoor gear and covered up by a big blanket, but sitting on the balcony while they drank piping hot tea and chatted was enough of a timeworn tradition between them that they honored it even in the winter months. Even when a damp, cold rain had turned Brooklyn into a muted, slightly stinky version of a Parisian street painting.
“For what?” Fin demanded. Via was the only person on this earth allowed to tickle Fin, and even then, it was only supposed to be used in the direst of circumstances. Via had been firmly instructed only to use tickle torture when Fin was obstinately refusing to talk about something that she should probably let out into the open air.
“For the storm cloud over your head. Something is bothering you and you won’t talk about it.”
Fin said nothing, just sipped her tea.
“Did you accept that blind date your client wanted to set you up on?” Via abruptly changed the subject.
One of her clients had insisted that she knew Mr. Perfect and had attempted to play matchmaker. She’d sworn that he was a great guy.
Fin frowned. “Of course not.”
“Why is that exactly?”
Fin turned her head and eyed her friend. “You know I’m not dating right now. I’m concentrating on...other things.”
Once upon a time, “other things” would have been becoming a foster parent. But over the last month, Kylie had found her way into the “other things” pile as well.
“Ah. Right. You don’t want a man to distract you. Which is what you told Tyler when he asked you out.”
“What does Tyler have to do with this?”
“Nothing!” Via said in a voice just a note too high to be innocent. She fiddled with her teacup. “Well, I think you should go on this blind date.”
“Why?” Fin asked, almost suspiciously.
Via shrugged. “I think it would help you...figure some stuff out.”
“Winnie explicitly said that this guy was really charming but looking for something uncomplicated because he lives bicoastally. How would that ever fit into my life?”
Via tossed her hands up. “You don’t want something casual, you don’t want something serious. I don’t think you have any idea what you want.” A thoughtful look came over her face, maybe a little bit sly. “Unless,” Via prompted, “you have feelings for someone else that I don’t know about?”
Fin couldn’t help but laugh. “Who on earth would I have feelings for?” Something popped up into the corner of Fin’s mind, a familiar and not altogether welcome energy. She shoved it back, away, and continued on. “Have you ever known me to have feelings for someone? Real feelings?”
“Well. No. But—”
“Violetta, you know how I feel about having a man in my life.”
“Is this all because of that dream? Your mother, the harbinger of doom, telling you that you won’t be able to foster if you go on a date with an interesting, available man?” Via huffed and threw her hands up in the air. “I’m so sick of your mother. And I never even met her.”
Fin sucked her teeth and let the view of the park fade in on itself, her thoughts spinning inward as she sought a way to explain. “My mother was no saint, Via, obviously. But she was rarely, if ever, wrong.”
“Oh, don’t give me that, Fin. Because one of the things you think she was not wrong about was that a man ruined her life by giving her you. And she was dead wrong about that. She ruined her own life by not appreciating what she had in a daughter. She’s not infallible. You can’t let her regrets guide your choices.”
Fin frowned. To someone who wasn’t clairvoyant, who didn’t see the patterns and repercussions of every little choice a person made, she supposed it would seem as if she were choosing to let a superstition run her life.
Becoming a foster parent, even if she was taking a break from the application process right now, was Fin’s nearest and dearest ambition. And it was a scary, unmapped maze of unknowns. And now Via just wanted her to cavalierly slap some dates on top of that? Fin would never find her way out of the labyrinth of her life if she did that. Things were complicated enough without adding a man in there. Besides, men were takers. They pursued hard, got what they wanted and gave nothing in return. Fin had a short string of casual relationships from her twenties to prove it. She didn’t need that in her life.
“Name one way, one, that having a man would make becoming a foster parent easier.”
“Oh, I don’t know, love and marriage and steadier income and a higher credit score and holy moly your application gets accepted!” Via took a big swig of her tea like it was an exclamation point at the end of her sentence.
“And I’m going to get all that from one blind date with a man who lives half his life in San Francisco?” Fin asked with a wry eyebrow inched up her forehead.
“Well.” Via pinched her face up. “No. Probably not. But the point isn’t about the man, it’s about you. Opening yourself up.”
“To love?” If her tone got any drier she’d have to serve it with a side of butter.
“I know you think of yourself as a hard nut to crack. I know you’re happy enough on your own. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need love in your life, Finny. Come on! Even you have to admit, your whole life has been in pursuit of love. What is being a foster parent if it’s not a search for people to love and care for?”
“That’s different. That’s familial love. Of course I’m looking for that.”
“News flash,” Via said, rolling onto her side and yanking the blankets clear up to her ears. “Romantic love, the lasting kind, has a very healthy dose of familial love twisted up in it. Seb is my boyfriend, sure. But he’s also my family. The same way you are, the same way Matty is.”
Fin frowned. She could feel the truth in Via’s words. It was just extremely inconvenient to her. It was much, much easier to think that romance and familial love lived in two completely different countries, and Fin could just go ahead and stay on one side of the border and never have to bother with exploring the other side.
“And,” Via continued, “I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but you can’t just put a stopper in one kind of love and expect the others to flow freely. It all comes from the same place, Fin. If you close off part of your heart, you might just be closing off the rest of it by accident.”
“HOW WAS YOUR first day of work?” Tyler asked, nudging a reheated plate of pasta over to Kylie. Mary had dropped her off at the house about ten minutes before. Tyler had spent an evening blissfully working, losing himself in his writing. It had felt good. Natural.
He’d waited to eat his dinner with Kylie, so he dug in to his own mountain of pasta with gusto.
“Actually, pretty cool. I helped Mary rearrange part of the store and then she had me work the register while she helped customers.”
She made a face that Tyler couldn’t interpret.
“What’s that face?”
“I like Mary’s store, but there’s just so much Christmas everywhere.”
He laughed at her caustic tone. “Well, you were hired to help out with the holiday rush. That might have been your first clue that you were going to be dealing with Christmas crap.”
Kylie shoved some pasta in her mouth and spoke through it. “I hope you don’t have big plans for Christmas.”
He frowned at her. Actually, he’d been stalling and had yet to make a single plan for Christmas, but he sensed that wasn’t the right answer either, so he kept his trap shut. “What do you mean?”
“I mean...if you have really important traditions or whatever, that’s cool. I guess we can do them. But other than that, would you mind if we kept it low-key?”
“I don’t have any traditions. And define low-key.”
She pushed her food around for a second and then ate another monumental bite. He couldn’t look away from the half-masticated food rolling around in her mouth. Was she doing this on purpose? “I mean that I really like Via and Seb and Matty, but I don’t think I can handle another awkward holiday over there. Holidays are obviously so special to their family but I just don’t need everything to be so meaningful.”
He laughed again. “I guess I see what you mean.”
“Let’s just not make a big deal out of it. It doesn’t have to be a Lifetime special around here.”
“So, no decorations?”
She grimaced. “There’s more than enough of that at Mary’s shop.”
“No Christmas music, no advent calendars, no letters to Santa?”
She gave him a dull look. “I think he’s catching on.”
“Seriously, I’m going to have start eating dinner with an eye mask on if you keep talking with your mouth full.”
Her eyes on his, she thoroughly chewed every bite of her food and then showed him her tongue. “Bettah?” she asked, tongue still out.
He rolled his eyes at her, trying to hide his giddiness that she was actually joking around with him. He didn’t want to seem like an overeager dork and blow it.
“So, really,” he clarified. “You want Christmas to just be a normal day?”
She shrugged. “Nothing special.”
He wondered for a moment if this was a test that he was bound to fail. If this was one of those things where she said “nothing special” but she really meant, “Throw a huge Christmas bash. Get me a pony, bake a thousand Christmas cookies, enter us into a brother-sister gingerbread house contest.”
He took a deep breath. He had instructions from his friends to be more Tyler around her. He wasn’t supposed to be guessing what a good parent would do. He was supposed to be responding to her the way he would to Matty.
“All right, kid.” Tyler leaned back in his chair. “One mediocre, unspecial, nondescript, totally forgettable Christmas coming right up.”
Kylie, apparently immune to the magnitude of the moment, simply rose up to clear her plate. “Perf. I’ve got homework.”
And then she was gone into her room. Tyler was halfway through the dishes when his phone rang. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and raised his eyebrows when he saw it was Fin calling him.
There was a time when he would have shaved his head bald to receive an unsolicited phone call from her. But now it merely perplexed him.
“Is this a butt dial?” he answered the phone.
“Do you always answer the phone using the word butt?” Her tone was flat but somehow still amused.
He laughed. “Whenever I can work it in, sure.”
“Why would you think I butt dialed you?” He could hear some small clinking noises on her end of the line, too light to be dishes.
He tried not to groan aloud at just how sagey and smoky her accent sounded over the phone. Not good for his morale. “Because I figured if you’re calling me, it had to be a mistake.”
“Actually, I’m not calling you. I wanted to talk to Kylie. See how work went, but I think her phone is off.”
He started walking down the hallway toward Kylie’s room. “I’m not sure I’m using your crystal right.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “It’s your crystal now.”
“Right. But, like, what am I supposed to be doing with it? I just mess around with it and then put it back in my pocket and forget about it.”
“That sounds about right. But listen, I forgot to tell you that you have to cleanse it.”
“With soap and water?”
She laughed, like he’d said something utterly ridiculous. He didn’t get the joke.
“No. Put it on a windowsill that gets moonlight. Or you can bury it in the soil of a houseplant for a night. Or drop it into some salt water. Noniodized.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” she asked.
“You’re asking me to do witchcraft on my crystal.”
“I’m not asking you to do witchcraft.”
“Moonlight? Dirt? Salt? That’s some witchy shit if I ever heard it.”
“Fine, then. Forget it and just use a dirty crystal, see if I care.”
There were more light clinking sounds on her end of the line. “What are you doing right now?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m settling a bet with myself.”
“What’s the bet?”
“That you’re doing witchcraft right this very second, on the phone with me. That you’re multitasking normal human stuff and witch stuff.”
“Will you stop calling me a witch?”
“Will you answer the question?”
Tyler leaned against the hallway wall, the phone to his ear and an embarrassingly large smile on his face.
She sighed after a long, obstinate moment of silence. “I’m bottling some tinctures that I made.”
He laughed, loud and cathartic. “Damn, it feels good to be right.”
“Tinctures aren’t witchcraft!”
He let his silence speak for itself.
“Tinctures aren’t necessarily witchcraft,” she amended.
“Uh-huh,” he said skeptically, utterly unconvinced. “Whatever you say, Cleopatra.” He paused, eyeing Kylie’s closed door. “Hey, quick question.”
“Shoot.”
“If a kid says they don’t want to do anything for Christmas, like anything at all, do you listen or do you ignore it and do something special anyway?”
Fin paused. “I think Kylie is the kind of person that doesn’t really want to do other people’s traditions.”
“But she wouldn’t be opposed to traditions of her own?”
“I don’t think she really has any traditions of her own.”
Tyler paused, frowning. “That is...supremely unhelpful advice.”
Fin burst out laughing on the other line and the sound of it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He smoothed a hand over his goose bumps.
“Seriously,” he groused. “What’s the point of having a psychic as a friend if she can’t even tell you what to do?”
Fin laughed again. He could practically hear the eye roll he was positive she was executing. “I only give the really good advice to paying customers. Will you put the kid on the line already?”
A smile on his face, he knocked on Kylie’s door. “There’s a phone call for you.”
Kylie came to the door, looking as perplexed as Tyler had felt upon answering the call from Fin.
“It’s Fin.”
He held the phone out to her and watched as Kylie’s face immediately brightened.
“Hi.”
She closed the door in his face and Tyler turned on his heel. Back to the dishes. He paused in the kitchen for a moment, studying the small window above his sink. On a whim, he flicked off the overhead lights. A shaft of moonlight sliced the windowsill in two. Sighing to himself for being such a sap, he walked across the room, set Fin’s pink crystal in the moonlight and finished the dishes in the dark.