Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances (6 page)

“You were going to go this way, no matter what?” I asked.

“Yeah, but you don’t have to prove anything to me.”

“It’s fine,” I said, trying to sound more certain than I felt. “So, we just keep walking?”

“That’s the plan.”

So that’s what we did. We knew we’d hit the creek when the snow got a little less deep, and there was a slight slipperiness underneath us instead of the thick, crunching, solid feeling. This is when Stuart decided to speak again.

“Those guys back at the Waffle House are so lucky. They’re about to have the best night of their lives,” he said.

There was something in his tone that sounded like a challenge, like he wanted me to take the bait. Which means I shouldn’t have. But I did, of course.

“God,” I said. “Why are all guys so easy like that?”

“Like what?” he said, giving me a sideways glance, slipping in the process.

“Saying that they’re lucky.”

“Because . . . they’re trapped in a Waffle House with a dozen cheerleaders?”

“Where does this arrogant fantasy come from?” I said, maybe a little more sharply than I intended. “Do guys really believe that if they are the only male in the area, that girls will suddenly crawl on top of them? Like we scavenge for lone survivors and reward them with group make-out sessions?”

“That
isn’t
what happens?” he asked.

I didn’t even dignify that remark with a comeback.

“But what’s wrong with cheerleaders?” he asked, sounding very pleased that he’d gotten such a rise out of me. “I’m not saying I
only
like cheerleaders. I’m just not prejudiced against them.”

“It’s not prejudice,” I said firmly.

“It’s not? What is it then?”

“It’s the idea of cheerleaders,” I said. “Girls, on the sidelines, in short skirts, telling guys that they’re great. Chosen for their looks.”

“I don’t know,” he said tauntingly. “Judging groups of people you don’t know, making assumptions, talking about their looks . . . it
sounds
like prejudice, but—”

“I am
not prejudiced
!” I shot back, unable to control my reaction now. There was so much darkness around us at that moment. Above us, there was a hazy pewter-pink sky. Around us, there were only the outlines of the skinny bare trees, like thin hands bursting out of the earth. Endless white ground below, and swirling flakes, and a lonely whistle of wind, and the shadows of houses.

“Look,” Stuart said, refusing to quit this annoying game, “how do you know that in their spare time, they aren’t EMTs or something? Maybe they save kittens, or run food banks, or—”

“Because they don’t,” I said, stepping ahead of him. I slipped a little but jerked myself upright. “In their spare time, they get waxings.”

“You don’t know that,” he called from behind me.

“I wouldn’t have to explain this to Noah,” I said. “He would just get it.”

“You know,” Stuart said evenly, “as wonderful as you think this Noah is—I’m not all that impressed with him right now.”

I’d had it. I turned around and started walking the way we had come, taking hard, firm steps.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “Oh, come on . . . ”

He tried to make it sound like it was no big deal, but I had simply had it. I stamped down hard to keep my gait steady.

“It’s a long way back!” he said, hurrying to catch up with me. “Don’t. Seriously.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, like I didn’t really care very much. “I just think it would be better if I . . . ”

There was a noise. A new noise under the whistle and the squeak and shift of ice and snow. It was a snapping noise that sounded kind of like a log on a fire, which was unpleasantly ironic. We both stopped exactly where we stood. Stuart flashed me a look of alarm.

“Don’t mov—”

And then the surface beneath us just went away.

Chapter Six

M
aybe you’ve never fallen into a frozen stream. Here’s what happens.

1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in your brain gets the readings and says, “I can’t deal with this. I’m out of here.” It puts up the
OUT TO LUNCH
sign and passes all responsibility to the . . .

2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can’t understand. “This is so not our job,” it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the . . .

3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic
loves
hitting buttons.

So, for a split second, Stuart and I were unable to do anything because of this bureaucratic mess going on in our heads. When we recovered a little, I was able to take some stock of what was happening to me. The good news was, we were only in up to our chests. Well, I was. The water came exactly breast-high. Stuart was in up to his mid-abdomen. The bad news was, we were in a hole in the ice, and it’s hard to get out of a hole in the ice when you are pretty much paralyzed with cold. We both tried to climb out, but the ice just kept breaking every time we put pressure on it.

As an automatic reaction, we grabbed each other.

“Okay,” Stuart said, shivering hard. “This is c-cold. And kind of bad.”

“No? Really?” I screamed. Except there wasn’t enough air in my lungs to allow me to scream, so it came out like a spooky little hiss.

“We . . . s-should . . . b-break it.”

This idea had occurred to me, too, but it was reassuring to hear it said out loud. We both started smashing at the ice with stiff, robotlike arms, until we reached the thick crust. The water was a bit shallower, but not by much.

“I’ll boost you up with my hand,” Stuart said. “Step up.”

When I tried to move my leg, it refused to cooperate right away. My legs were so numb that they didn’t really work anymore. Once I got them going, Stuart’s hands were too cold to support me. It took some tries, but I eventually got a foothold.

Of course, once I got up, I made the important discovery that
ice is slippery
, and therefore very hard to hold on to, especially when your hands are also covered in wet bags. I reached back and helped pull Stuart, who landed flat on the ice.

We were out. And being out felt a lot worse than being in, weirdly enough.

“Iss . . . not . . . tha . . . far,” he said. It was hard to understand him. My lungs felt like they were wobbling. He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a house just at the top of the rise. If he hadn’t dragged me, I would never have made it up the hill.

I have never, ever been so happy to see a house. It was entirely outlined by a faint greenish glow, interspersed with tiny dots of red. The back door was unlocked, and we stepped into a paradise. It wasn’t that it was the most amazing house I had ever been in—it was simply a house, with warmth, and a residual smell of cooked turkey and cookies and tree.

Stuart didn’t stop pulling me until we reached a door, which turned out to lead to a bathroom with a glass shower stall.

“Here,” he said, pressing me in. “Shower. Now. Warm water.”

The door slammed and I heard him run off. I stripped off what I was wearing immediately, stumbling as I reached for the shower knob. My clothes were frighteningly heavy, full of water and snow and mud.

I stayed in there a long time, slumped against the wall, filling the little room with steam. The water changed temperature once or twice, probably because Stuart was also taking a shower somewhere else in the house.

I turned off the water only when it started to go cold. When I emerged into the thick steam, I saw that my clothes were gone. Someone had extracted them from the bathroom without my noticing. In their place were two large towels, a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, socks, and slippers. The clothes were for a guy, except for the socks and slippers. The socks were thick and pink, and the slippers were white fluffy booties, very worn.

I grabbed for the nearest item, which was a sweatshirt, and held it up to my naked self, even though I was clearly alone in the bathroom now.
Someone
had come in.
Someone
had been lurking around, removing my clothes and replacing them with new, dry ones. Had Stuart let himself in while I was showering? Had he seen me in my natural state? Did I even care at this point?

I dressed quickly, putting on every single item that had been left for me. I opened the door a crack and peered out. The kitchen appeared empty. I opened the door wider, and suddenly a woman popped out of nowhere. She was mom-aged, with curly blonde hair that looked like it had been fried by using a home coloring kit. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of two hugging koalas in Santa hats. The only thing I really cared about, though, was the fact that she was holding out a steaming mug.

“You poor thing!” she said. She was really loud, one of those people you can easily hear across entire parking lots. “Stuart’s upstairs. I’m his mom.”

I accepted the mug. It could have been a cup of hot poison, but I would have drunk it anyway.

“Poor thing,” she said again. “Don’t you worry. We’ll get you warm again. Sorry I couldn’t find anything to fit you better. Those are Stuart’s, and the only clean ones I could find in the laundry. I put your clothes in the washer, and your shoes and coat are drying on the heater. If you need to call anyone, you just go right ahead. Don’t worry if it’s long distance.”

This was my introduction to Stuart’s mom (“Call me Debbie”). I’d known her for all of twenty seconds, and already she had seen my underwear and was offering me her son’s clothes. She immediately planted me at the kitchen table and started pulling out endless Saran-wrapped plates from the refrigerator.

“We had Christmas Eve dinner while Stuart was at work, but I made plenty! Plenty! Eat up!”

There was a lot of food: turkey and mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, the works. She brought
all
of it out and insisted on making me a big plateful, with a hot cup of chicken-dumpling soup on the side. By this point, I was hungry—maybe hungrier than I’d ever been in my life.

Stuart reappeared in the doorway. Like me, he was dressed for warmth. He was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a stretched-out cable sweater. I don’t know . . . maybe it was the sense of gratitude, my general happiness at being alive, the absence of a bag on his head . . . but he was kind of good-looking. And any of my former annoyance with him was gone.

“You’ll set Julie up for the night?” she asked. “Make sure to turn off the tree so it doesn’t keep her awake.”

“I’m sorry . . . ” I said. It was only now that I realized that I had just crashed into their lives on Christmas.

“Don’t you apologize! I’m glad you had the sense to come here! We’ll take care of you. Make sure she has enough blankets, Stuart.”

“There will be blankets,” he assured her.

“She needs one now. Look. She’s freezing. So do you. Sit here.”

She hustled into the living room. Stuart raised his eyebrows as if to say,
This may go on for a while.
She returned with two fleece throws. I was wrapped in a deep blue one. She swaddled me in it, like I was a baby, to the point where it was kind of hard to move my arms.

“You need more hot chocolate,” she said. “Or tea? We have all kinds.”

“I’ve got it, Mom,” Stuart said.

“More soup? Eat the soup. That’s homemade, and chicken soup is like natural penicillin. After the chill you’ve both had—”

“I’ve got it, Mom.”

Debbie took my half-empty soup cup, refilled it to the top, and put it in the microwave.

“Make sure she knows where everything is, Stuart. If you want anything during the night, you just get it. You make yourself at home. You’re one of ours now, Julie.”

I appreciated the sentiment, but I thought that was a strange way of putting it.

Chapter Seven

S
tuart and I spent several quiet moments contentedly stuffing our faces once Debbie was gone. Except, I got the feeling that she wasn’t really gone—I never heard her walk away. I think Stuart felt this, too, because he kept turning around.

“This soup really is amazing,” I said, because that sounded like a good remark to have overheard. “I’ve never had anything like it. It’s the dumplings . . . ”

“You’re probably not Jewish, that’s why,” he said, getting up and shutting the accordion kitchen door. “Those are matzo balls.”

“You’re Jewish?”

Stuart held up a finger, indicating I should wait. He rattled the door a little, and there was a series of rapid, creaking steps, like someone trying to hurry quietly up the stairs.

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought we had company. Must have been mice. Yeah, my mom is, so technically, yes. But she has this thing about Christmas. I think she does it to fit in. She goes kind of overboard, though.”

The kitchen had been completely converted for the season. The hand towels, the toaster cover, the fridge magnets, the curtains, the tablecloth, the centerpiece . . . the more I looked, the more Christmasy it got.

“Did you note the fake electric holly on the way in?” Stuart asked. “Our house is never going to be on the cover of
Southern Jew
at this rate.”

“So, why . . . ”

He shrugged.

“Because it’s what people do,” he said, picking up another piece of turkey, folding it, and shoving it in his mouth. “Especially around here. There isn’t exactly what you would call a thriving Jewish community. My Hebrew-school class was just me and one other girl.”

“Your girlfriend?”

Something passed over his face, a rapid wave of forehead wrinkling and mouth twitching that I suspected was a suppressed laugh.

“Just because there’s only two of us doesn’t mean we have to pair-bond,” he said. “It’s not like someone says, ‘Okay—you two Jews! Dance!’ No, she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Sorry,” I said quickly. This was the second time I had mentioned his girlfriend—trying to show off my observational skill—and again, he just deflected. That was it. No more mentioning it. He obviously didn’t want to talk about her. Which was a little odd . . . he seemed like the type who would happily rattle on about his girlfriend for about seven hours. He just gave that vibe.