What I Should Have Done ✓

Chapter 27

The deal was that we would only be spending two nights in Massachusetts. That way, I got to spend a full week alone with Dad and Grampa before heading down to my mom's on the 24th. It was a great time, the driveway was snowed in so we had to shovel most days, and I made hot cocoa and sugar cookies for when Dad got home from work in the afternoons. I even helped Grampa to start cleaning out his attic, something he had been meaning to do for years, and went snowshoeing with my high school friend Bethany who was home from college as well.

But no matter what all I did to keep myself occupied, the 24th eventually came and we packed up Grampa's newish silver SUV before heading south to Central Massachusetts. With immense relief, we thanked the heavens for the clear roads and that we didn't have to drive through Boston. The holiday traffic was bad enough on our route.

My mom and Michael and Elsie met us on the porch when the car pulled up in their driveway. They looked like the people on home décor ads: Michael with his perfectly bourgeois salt-and-pepper comb-over hair and crisp white shirt underneath a blue knit sweater, Mom with a country club loose perm and tan pants and a gray knit sweater, and Elsie with her long, blond hair in a French braid and wearing cute new-looking ankle boots. The whole family looked like they had sprung from a Town & Country catalog dedicated to owners of white picket fences. Believing I had once belonged to that same family (or at least two thirds of it) was difficult to wrap my head around.

I bet Elsie loved her new boots and wore them around the house. Perks of being in a wheelchair, she would say. She had grown so much. I could hardly believe she was turning 16 in January. But then, I could hardly believe I was 20 already.

The welcome was warm, and Mom and Dad seemed fine around each other, as did Michael and Dad. Grampa and Michael had never met, but they, too, seemed to get along fine. I was suspicious of the shiny happy family front, but I would have to play along if this holiday was going to be bearable. Phoniness may have been a pet peeve of mine, but outright confrontation was off the table.

That afternoon, I was on cookie-baking duty with Elsie, who had volunteered the both of us for gingersnaps, while Mom went grocery shopping, Michael stopped by his parents' place nearby, and Dad and Grampa drove into town to look around. I had wanted to go with them, but had been gone so fast. Not that I didn't like baking, not that it wasn't nice to spend some time with my sister, but I would have rather spent more time with my core family.

***

Elsie was excited to bake with me, and even though it was Christmas, I insisted on doing Grammy's oatmeal raisin cookies in addition to the gingersnaps.

"I don't get why you like those so much when you could use chocolate chips instead of the raisins." Elsie's voice was so eerily mean-girl-like that I had to remind myself she was my sister and not a stranger.

"It's not only the taste. They remind me of Grammy. I baked with her a lot."

"My hand-stitched throw pillow reminds me of Grammy, or Mom's ugly black loafers remind me of Grammy." I smirked despite myself. Elsie shrugged one shoulder sassily, then reminded me: "Don't put too much flour in there, the dough isn't supposed to be too thick."

"The recipe is right here and I'm following it, Ma'am." Where does she get this tone? As if I had never made gingersnaps before. I supposed she had always had the tendency, but I had forgotten about it.

Side by side we worked on the doughs for a while. The silent agreement we had come to after her reprimand was that I would do my oatmeal raisin cookies while the princess would graciously accept the burden of preparing the gingersnaps for the good of all of us.

Elsie's playlist had finished, now the only sounds audible were ingredient containers opening and closing, the low humming of the fridge, and some of the mysterious creaks houses made. The silence was a welcome change from the non-stop acoustic pollution through Christmas pop.