Page 50 of Take Me Home

Val smiled far too brightly. “It’s okay. What do you have?”

Other than her gray sweaterdress, Hazel had brought a pencil skirt and a white blouse, staples of her teaching wardrobe. At some point she’d equated “small backyard wedding” with “courthouse wedding,” for which she’d figured she could fancy the skirt and blouse up with jewelry and her faux-fur-lined cardigan with the pearl buttons. As she relayed this, Val kept smiling and nodding, not a single crack of disappointment showing. “Sorry. Is that not nice enough?”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Val said. “It’ll be fine. The important thing is that we’re all together.”

Except if the dresses were being dry-cleaned, they were most likely fancy. Hazel would look like a photobomber, not a family member. She could tell Val didn’t want to make a big deal of it. She was truly going to let it go. But Hazel’s skin felt too tight with her mistake. If she hadn’t been so irrationally irritated when she got that email, she would have paid better attention. She would have bought a damn dress.

Hazel’s gaze fell once more to the packages with her name on them. There were at least seven, maybe more. She hadn’t exchanged physical gifts with her dad in years. They always sent electronic gift cards to each other first thing on Christmas morning. She hadn’t even thought to get him a real card this year, let alone anything for Val and her kids.

“I’ll look for a dress today,” Hazel said. “I need to do some shopping anyway.”

“Do you…want company?” her father asked, a hopeful lilt in his voice. “I’m free today.”

She slid her phone into her pocket, already edging out of the room. “I would, but I still have to get your gift, so I’d better go alone.”

Now, hours later and nearly empty-handed on both the dress front and the gifts front despite hitting three shops already, Hazel rolled her head against the wall behind the bench to look at Ash. She’d found a few small things she could go back for—hair clips for Lucy, a set of cloth napkins for Val that matched the navy-and-gold kitchen cabinets. Ash had a single bag with a book light for his mom and a Taylor Swift phone cover for Leanne. “Maybe I could get one of those covers for Lucy.”

“What kind of phone does she have?”

She groaned. She’d seen it several times but didn’t know for sure. “How about for Raf? All I know is he’s going to UT next year, likes dogs, and plays the tuba. How am I supposed to shop for that? What does a seventeen-year-old guy want for Christmas?”

“Honestly?” His lips twitched in a smile, and she rolled her eyes.

“Don’t say a PornHub subscription. I’m just going to give everyone gift cards.”

“Giving up already, huh?”

“I should have gone to Sylvia’s.”

He started to ask, but she shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to check “presents” off her list and get out of here.

“You said you need a dress. Why don’t we focus on that?” He pushed up from the bench and held out his hand.

But she was getting too comfortable with him trying to easethe weight of things for her. If she kept letting him, one day, she’d be used to himbeing there, offering a hand, lifting the other side of a heavy tree, putting his coat around her shoulders. If she got used to it and then he disappeared, it’d be so much harder to reset than to continue on as she always had.

She rose without his help and pushed back into the crowd.

—

While Hazel browsed racks of dresses at a secondhand boutique that was less crowded than the other shops, Ash meandered nearby, lifting and dropping price tags on clothing, necklaces, hats. He never ventured too far to call questions back at her, like whether she and her mom were close.

She told him about her mother’s job, traveling all over the world to open new spas for a hotel chain. She’d started as a receptionist and worked her way up, earning her first big promotion right before the divorce, then relocating to Chicago. After that, she went to New York, London, countless other places, never staying long anywhere. The current stint was in Paris. Because of time differences and her mother’s long hours, their communication had shifted over the years from spotty phone calls to even less consistent volleys of emails. They usually caught up around the time her mother wanted to share her next destination.

“You ever visit her anywhere cool?” Ash asked.

“New York. Summer before college. My luggage got lost for a week. There was always some crisis in the spa, so I spent the whole visit in the hotel room—she lives in whatever hotel she’s working at. I think she thought I’d be impressed by all the TV channels and room service.”

“She didn’t take you to do touristy things?”

“I don’t thinksheever did touristy things, in any of theplaces she’s worked. She stays busy. But the hotel gym had yoga and other classes. Those were fun.”

“Ah, the start of your yoga journey,” he said, grinning.

She laughed. “Shut up.”

“Does she ever visit you?”

“The first few years after she left, I’d visit my grandparents in Colorado for two weeks in the summer, and she’d come to see me there.”

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