minute!”
The doorbell rang. If Derrick had been a cat, his fur would have stood entirely on end.
“Do I have to do everything myself?” Derrick growled. He jogged off to the door. Miriam, Bill, and I exchanged looks. I rolled my eyes. Hopefully Jerry would get here soon.
As I started for the garage, I heard the front door open. Cold air, sharp with the scent of woodsmoke drifted in.
“Oh, hello Kris. Don’t you look nice.” I could hear from Derrick’s voice that he had relaxed. I pictured his smile, like sunlight streaming across the dawn horizon, slow and gentle.
I scowled as I went into the garage. “Squaw, gather firewood,” I muttered. But when I emerged, I was all smiles, even hugged the evil one herself. “Let’s get this party started!” I yelled.
By anyone’s measure, Derrick’s party was a success. Twenty two guests showed up by the end of the first two hours. Everyone found something (or someone) to nibble on. Students exhausted from their finals rejuvenated themselves with alcoholic beverages and decadent holiday treats. The conversation was a comfortable, contented hum against the instrumental Christmas music. Derrick had even managed to chill out and enjoy his own party.
But Jerry still had not come. This was far from unusual. Jerry’s tardy days to class far outnumbered his on-time ones. Even when we got together outside of class, I could count on him being at least fifteen to twenty minutes late. But this was late, even for him. It was looking more and more like he wasn’t going to make it. Somehow I squelched the urge to check my facebook, my phone, my email. Missing him, I sat on the couch picking at some cheese and crackers and responded to the conversation around me with automatic, artificial brightness. I hoped no one noticed my eye roving to the clock, it felt like a hundred times per minute.
At last it was time for the gift giving. Derrick and his family herded all the guests into the living room and lowered the music volume. I tried to excuse the lengthy, boring proceeding by remembering that many of these friends would be out of town for Christmas day. Didn’t it make sense to give them their presents now when the givers could see their reactions? Then I thought of my cookies and had to turn up my smile to disguise my growing disappointment.
The gathering was very impressed with the model I had gotten Derrick. That moment cheered me up somewhat.
Then Derrick’s present for Kris was up. A morbid curiosity rose in me. What had he gotten her? The box was obscenely large, like a prop from the Nutcracker. It contained what looked like an entire package of tissue paper.
“Oh my God!” the people sitting near Kris said.
It was the tea set Derrick had been working on. It wasn’t for one of Miriam’s friends, after all.
I remembered in a hot, angry flash all the time he had spent painting it. Derrick had covered the white porcelain in tiny flowers and birds. They stood out like minute jewels.
The guests passed around the delicate cups, the teapot and tray. I got to look at every piece, each in its awful turn.
“You just keep getting better, Derrick,” Miriam said, I suppose to smooth things over.
Derrick, that pompous ass, had already picked his way to Kris, had his arms open for the hug he expected.
Kris’s lips curled, bared her teeth. It was supposed to be a smile, but I saw an embarrassed grimace. “Thank you, Derrick. It’s amazing.” Derrick probably dismissed Kris’s flat voice as her being dazed by his awesome artwork.
“You’re amazing,” Derrick proclaimed. “My very best friend.” He’d barely drunk anything at all tonight. I wondered how he could say these things. Hearing them made me want to retch. Couldn’t Derrick hear how stupid he sounded?
“And now for Leah, love of my life.” Derrick planted a dutiful kiss on my cheek as though we were a middle-aged British couple. I opened the envelope he gave me with clumsy, numb fingers. There. A one hundred dollar gift certificate to Keystone Spa. Unquestionably it had been more expensive than Kris’s tea set. It had also required a fraction of the thought. It was a present you could get for any girl. It was as trite as a magazine advice column. I couldn’t help but think, as my eyes filled with tears, that Jerry would have known what I wanted. Jerry would have understood. I wished he were here.
“And that’s the last of our gifts, though far from the least,” Bill said. He turned up the Christmas music. Whispers began to fly around the room like snow flurries, the speakers glancing my way or at Kris. I felt as though I had been put on display, the clearance rack, to be exact.
“So which one’s the girlfriend?” one of the younger, drunker girls asked.
Fortunately for me, the party disbanded about an hour later. If it had gone on much longer, I would have had to go home with a “headache.” Back at home, I set Jerry’s full cookie tin at the corner of my desk and went to bed. Even when the sun came in and shone full on my face, I rolled over and slept til evening.
After dinner, I started trying to get in touch with Jerry. I tried leaving a friendly voice message for him at first. The second day I tried bribing him into coming for his cookies. “Or I can bring them to you!” I offered. Unexpectedly, my voice cracked, and I started crying. I hung up and called Jerry, well, his voice mail, a second time.
“It’s like this,” I said and recounted the awfulness of the party. “Please call me,” I whimpered at the end. “I really need someone to talk to.”
The third day, Jerry finally called me.
“How are you?” he asked me.
I felt like a super manipulative bitch as I tried to decide how I would answer that. I felt ten thousand times better now that I could hear his voice. But I had not talked to Derrick since the party. Usually we had our weekend plans set up by now. I finally decided on, “I’m hanging in there. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Yeah, I heard your message.”
“Can we get together and talk? We can meet halfway. It will only be a half an hour drive for both of us.” A pleading edge had entered my voice.
After a long silence, Jerry said, “We’ll see what happens. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Dread seized me. I knew what would happen next, as though it were a recurring nightmare. Jerry wouldn’t call when he said he would. He’d get in touch a week or two later, having forgotten the whole conversation, and not understanding why I was angry.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” I said in a small voice. But Jerry was already offering hurried encouragement and saying his goodbyes. He did not even hear me. I ended the conversation with a sullen goodbye. For the next fifteen minutes, I just stared at his cookie tin. I pictured myself going outside and hurling those damn Star Wars cookies against the wall.
The next morning I woke up to Jerry’s present staring at me. Every minute I had worked on it came back to me. My cheeks burned in shame as I remembered the heady rush I’d experienced as I daydreamed about giving them to him.
Even now I longed for Jerry’s insights. I wanted to analyze my relationship with Derrick like it was something safe and remote, a text in a literature class, for instance.
But clearly, this was something I was going to have to do myself, without Jerry.
Jerry, my dearest friend.
Jerry, who was, now that I thought about it, about as dependable as Kris.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so undoable after all. Maybe I’d walked and thought and decided on my own all along without realizing.
I scribbled my thoughts on computer paper before calling up Derrick. “We need to talk,” I said.
“Ok,” he said.
In my nervousness, I almost giggled. As clueless as he was, even Derrick had a sixth sense for this sort of thing, the looming end of a relationship.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said with a steadier voice than I expected, given how my heart was pounding like a bass speaker vibrating my entire body.
About an hour later, we parted on amicable terms, though I don’t think Derrick really understood why I was leaving him. He wouldn�
��t, I thought, my gaze returning to Jerry’s present. Not unless he saw what I had seen that night.
That memory, that awful memory, decided me. I dumped Jerry’s cookies, tin and all, in the outdoor trash. Maybe I would feel up to sending him a card sometime after New Years.
The End
{****}
Other stories by Meghann McVey:
The Gift not Given Page 3
