You

by Nella Tyler

My brother and sisters voted for Santa presents first, my mom for family presents—along with me—and the kids, of course, didn’t care. Dad called it a tie and started distributing presents as they appeared in the pile, handing them off to whoever’s name was on the tag. All of us went to work on ripping paper and untying ribbons, and I looked up every so often to catch the reactions of my nieces and nephews as they unveiled one new present after another.

  “I was surprised at how late you stayed up last night,” Evie said to me, putting aside a mug set that John got for her after thanking him. “You been staying up late often these days?”

  “Mack doesn’t have a reason to stay up late, if you know what I mean,” my brother Alex called out.

  “I have plenty of reasons,” I called back, rolling my eyes at him. I finished unwrapping a present from my mom to find that it was a cashmere scarf—absolutely beautiful. “Thanks, Mom!”

  “No problem sweetie,” Mom called out absently, tearing the paper on a big, lumpy box from one of the kids. “It looked like it would be perfect for you.”

  “So, are you going to be kissing anyone on New Year’s Eve at Mom and Dad’s party?” I rolled my eyes at John’s question.

  “I don’t know—are you? Because Angela’s present doesn’t seem all that impressive. Maybe she’ll kiss me instead.”

  “Guys, back off of her,” my brother Alex’s wife, Liz said. “You do realize that if Mack settles down and has kids, none of us are going to get as many presents from her, right?” Liz gave me a quick smile that told me she was concerned about more than just a lack of presents from me. I grinned back.

  “It’s practically tradition for everyone in the family over the age of eighteen to meddle in my love life,” I said, shrugging off the questions. I took a sip of my coffee and went back to opening the pile of gifts in front of me. I’d gotten a new pair of smartphone gloves, a couple of new books, a bracelet my niece had made by hand, and other odds and ends.

  For a little while, at least, everyone was too interested in the presents in front of them to even worry about giving me grief about my love life, and I started to relax. My nieces and nephews took turns coming up to me to give me a hug and kiss of thanks for their presents, and I beamed at their excited reactions: Charlotte almost couldn’t wait to have me help her figure out the art kit I’d gotten her, Evie had to keep Lacy from shaking her new butterfly kit to pieces and killing the caterpillars inside. Derrick put on the pieces of his superhero kit and opened the rest of his presents with a cape and a mask on.

  As the frenzy began to slow down, I sat back, my new scarf draped around my neck, examining some of the more intricate presents I’d gotten. “Didn’t you say you had a date with someone about a week ago or so?” I rolled my eyes at Dad.

  “It starts again,” I said, sighing. “I did have a date, yes.”

  “Was it a first date?” John leered at me.

  “No, it was more like the fourth or so,” I admitted. At least, I thought, if I gave them some kind of details about my relationship with Patrick, they might let off of me for a while.

  “Why didn’t you invite him over? You’re old enough that we wouldn’t make you stay in separate rooms,” My mom said. I laughed.

  “He’s actually got his own family Christmas to go to,” I told them. “He’s got a son, a five-year-old boy named Landon.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  I blushed; at least, I thought, my parents and siblings wouldn’t have much of a clue about the fact that my relationship with Patrick was not exactly appropriate. “He’s the father of one of my patients,” I said. Charlotte climbed into my lap and leaned against me.

  “So his little boy got hurt?” …her understanding of my job wasn’t very deep.

  “He did,” I told her. “He was playing soccer and moved wrong on the field, and broke his leg.”

  “Ouch!” Charlotte’s face twisted into a sympathetic grimace. “You’re helping him get better?”

  “I am!” I gave Charlotte a little squeeze. “He has to get strong so he won’t keep limping.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Yeah, and tell us about the dad—if you’re dating him, he must be interesting.” I blushed and focused on answering Charlotte’s question.

  “Landon’s about a year or so younger than you are,” I told my little niece. “He’s like your brother Cary—always moving around, even though he was still on crutches when he started coming to see me.”

  “Is his dad handsome?”

  I glanced at Evie and my other siblings and smiled in spite of myself. “He is very handsome,” I admitted. “I like him a lot.”

  “One of the girls in my class is going to get a new mom,” Charlotte told me. “Her dad asked his girlfriend to marry him. Lisa said that she was going to be the flower girl in the wedding, and that she was going to get a new sister or brother, too. Are you going to be Landon’s new mom?” My cheeks burned, the blood rushed into them so fast. All the rest of the adults in the room laughed, and Charlotte had no idea why; I didn’t want her to feel bad.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to be Landon’s new mom,” I told her. “I’ve only known his dad for a little while. It takes a long time to know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone.”

  “Lisa said her daddy’s been dating her new mom for a whole year!” Charlotte looked shocked by that timeframe and I heard more laughter from the other adults in the room. “That’s a really long time, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said, though it didn’t seem all that long to me; for Charlotte, at age six, it was a chunk of her lifetime.

  “Do you want to become Landon’s new mom? If you’re still with his dad?”

  “A lot of things can happen from now till then,” I pointed out. “But Landon is a nice boy. He deserves a good mom.”

  “You would be a good mom,” Charlotte said, nodding seriously. “I hope that you can be Landon’s mom someday.” She scurried off of my lap then, tired of her own questions, her curiosity satisfied; fortunately the rest of my family seemed to have gotten what they wanted out of the exchange too, and everyone settled in to play with their new toys or admire their other presents.

  Mom slipped into the kitchen unannounced to start working on Christmas breakfast, and I chatted with my siblings and in-laws, telling them about some of the funnier moments, and talking about the holiday party at the clinic, where Amie had—in spite of her injuries—managed to get just drunk enough to kiss every member of the staff under the mistletoe and photocopy her bare ass five times.

  The conversation turned back onto Patrick, but I managed to bear up and keep a straight face. I didn’t want to tell anyone that I was pretty sure things wouldn’t work out between us because they were already starting to become a little strained; I didn’t want to have to deal with their commiseration or their questions about what I’d done to “drive another man away.”

  I told them about the first date, and about going ice-skating, and how Landon was one of the most cheerful, upbeat kids I worked with. I told them about the mental struggle of deciding whether or not I should even get Patrick a present, and my sisters nodded at the wisdom of me buying a present for Landon and Patrick to essentially share. “Are you sure you want to get involved with a guy who already has a kid? That seems like a lot of baggage,” Evie pointed out as everyone started to wander into the kitchen to start filling their plates with breakfast.

  “Well, he’s not divorced; his wife passed away shortly after Landon’s birth.”

  “Still, though,” Evie leaned in a little closer. “That can almost be worse; what if he’s comparing you to her?”

  “I don’t think he is,” I said quickly. “I mean, it’s been years since she passed away, and after all…she barely had an opportunity to be Landon’s mom.” But Evie had hit on a question that had been running around in the back of my mind for days: what if the reason that Patrick was starting to cool off was because he didn’t think I’d be a goo
d co-parent to Landon?

  I could understand why that would be a worry for him; after all, if he got serious about someone he was dating, he would have to make sure that whoever it was would be a good influence on his son. But he’d pointed out so many times that I was good with the kids I worked with, so I couldn’t think of a way that he might think that I would be bad for Landon. I went into breakfast with my family and tried to push aside any thought of Patrick at all; I could only hope that with their curiosity mostly satisfied, my parents and siblings would leave me alone about the man I was dating, at least for the rest of the day. There were way more exciting things to think about, including the presents everyone had gotten; I just hoped that I’d have some kind of answer from Patrick himself, whether it was that he didn’t want to see me anymore or that he did, within a few days.

  Chapter Eight - Patrick

  I watched Landon scurry into his bedroom with a big armful of toys and chuckled, moving to throw myself onto the couch. Christmas Day had been busy for both of us—but Landon had reserves of energy that I’d lost when I got out of college. “You got a good haul this year, bud!”

  “Yeah!” Landon’s voice came to me muffled from the distance between the couch and his bedroom.

  “Which presents did you like the best?” I heard a thump—and for a fraction of a second, I was concerned that Landon might have fallen in his headlong rush. The next instant though, I heard the sound of his feet on the floor and he ran out of his bedroom with about three of the new toys he’d gotten.

  One of them had come from Joanne’s parents: an eBook reader pre-loaded with about a dozen books on it, with software that would help Landon learn new words and quiz him about the concepts in the stories. “That’s one of your favorites?” I asked, pointing it out.

  “Yeah! It has games, too,” Landon explained. He put it down on the coffee table and showed me the next toy; it was a new action figure for his Skylander collection, one that Landon had been wanting for weeks—it had come from Santa. I smiled as he exclaimed over how cool it was and how much more he was going to be able to play.

  “Did you put your new toys away nicely?” I asked him. I noticed that the third toy he’d brought out was the make-your-own kite that Mack had gotten him.

  “Yes,” Landon said; he looked away.

  “If I go in there and look, is that what I’m going to see?” Landon looked down at his feet. I sighed, fighting the urge to laugh at the fact that my son was incapable of lying believably. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s get your toys straightened up and start putting together what you’re going to donate, and then we’ll have some time to play before we eat dinner. How’s that sound?”

  “Okay!” Landon grabbed up the toys he had brought into the living room with him and hurried back towards his bedroom. I followed, hating to get off the couch but telling myself that time with my son was time with my son—I got little enough of it as it was.

  His room wasn’t a total wreck, but I helped him as he went about straightening it; putting his dirty clothes from the holidays in the hamper, putting his new toys in the trunk and on the shelves where he could play with them, plugging in his eBook reader so it would be ready for him later. I helped him gather up the toys that he wanted to donate to the shelters, too; it was something that I’d done with Landon every Christmas since he was one year old. The idea had been Joanne’s, and it was a small way of keeping her memory alive.

  She had said, while she was pregnant with Landon, that she never wanted our son to become spoiled. “I see so many kids who have more toys than they ever play with, and then other kids go without—it’s a travesty.” Joanne’s idea had been that every year at Christmas, we’d go through our child’s things with him, and pick out some toys that were still in perfectly good shape, but that he didn’t play with regularly, and donate those to children living in shelters or orphanages. I’d tried to set a good example by letting Landon help me pick out clothes and other items of my own to donate—including donating old but still working electronics whenever I bought a new one.

  By the time we finished, about thirty minutes later, there was a nice-sized box of toys to go to the shelter, and I hunkered down with my son to play with him. One of the gifts he’d gotten—not one of his favorites, but one that was a useful thing nonetheless—was a board game, and I suggested that there was no better way for Landon to learn how to play it than to go through a round of it right away.

  We opened up the box and laid everything out, and in minutes Landon was wrapped up in the game; all I had to do was make sure I was paying attention to him and not dawdling when it was my turn to roll the dice or do one of the challenges that came up. “I wonder what Mack is doing right now,” Landon said, letting the dice fall onto the cardboard.

  “What makes you think about that?”

  Landon shrugged. “I really liked the kite she got me,” he explained, “and I want to thank her.”

  “That would be a nice thing to do,” I told him. “Maybe you could make her a card to show her how grateful you are.”

  “I will!” Landon picked up a challenge card. “Spin in a circle five times,” he read.

  “Well, get to it or miss your move,” I said, grinning. Landon scrambled up and stepped back from the board game on the floor, and spun in a circle while I counted out how many revolutions he made. He tumbled effortlessly back onto the floor giggling.

  We talked about how much fun the game would be with some of his friends, but Landon’s comment had brought Mack up in my mind again. I wished I knew how her holidays had gone—she had mentioned something about meddling relatives, her parents and siblings wanting to know everything about her love life. I’d hoped that she’d managed to get through it without feeling weird about our relationship, but I didn’t quite have the courage to call and ask her about how it had been. I’d already decided I was going to wait another day to give her a call, to try and make another effort at mending our relationship.

  “Hey Dad,” Landon said, when I started warming up leftovers that we’d brought home from the family get-together for dinner, “we should wait for after the new year to give my toys to the shelter.”

  “Why’s that, buddy?”

  I looked up from the microwave to look at Landon at the breakfast bar, coloring. “You’re going to be buying me a lot more presents in a couple of weeks,” he pointed out. “When you lose the bet.”

  “When I lose the bet, eh?” I grinned. “I wasn’t sure you were keeping track of that.”

  “Yep!” Landon paused in the midst of his coloring and hopped down from the bar stool, hurrying into his bedroom. I shrugged off his behavior and checked on the heating food, trying to make sure I didn’t start a fire in the microwave or melt anything. “See?” I turned around again and saw that my son was holding up a calendar. I frowned for a second, confused—and then realized that every day since he’d made the bet with me to the current day was marked with a big X.

  “You’ve been keeping track!”

  I turned away from the stove and microwave to examine the calendar in a little more detail. Sure enough, I had a little less than a week until New Year’s Day, which was when Landon had wanted me to find him a new mother by.

  “Yep. And I don’t think you are going to win,” Landon told me. “You have six and a half days to find me a new mom, Dad.”

  “I know, I know.”

  I smiled but I felt a little crushed at the reminder. The one real shot I’d made at winning the bet had been with Mack—and I had no idea where we stood. It was stupid of me to have given into Landon’s wager; it would have been impossible to know that I would want someone in my life—and Landon’s—for the rest of it after only knowing her for less than a month.

  “You kept my list, right Dad?” Landon’s eyes looked eager for the toys that he knew he would be getting in a few weeks’ time. I laughed again and the microwave beeped to let me know that the food was heated up.

  “I did. So if and when you win our bet, I
will be able to get you your list all over again.”

  “I’m gonna win,” Landon said with confidence in his voice. “Are you going to ask Mack out again?”

  I turned away so that Landon wouldn’t see me cringe. “I don’t know, buddy. She’s pretty busy, and I don’t know what her plans are for New Years. We’ll see how things go in a week or so.” Just saying it made me feel down; I wasn’t sure whether I was more upset at the fact that I had been dumb enough to put a couple hundred dollars on the line in a wager with my five-year-old son, or if I was more disappointed that I hadn’t been able to prove him wrong and give him the mom I knew he was craving—or at least a woman in his life who might eventually fulfill that role.

  We sat down to eat up some of the Christmas dinner leftovers we’d had from both Joanne’s parents and my own, talking about what we wanted to do during the week that I would be off for the holidays. I always took off from Christmas Day until the day after New Year’s Day, every year—I wanted to make the most of Landon’s holiday break from school, so I wouldn’t put a strain on my siblings, parents, and in-laws, and so I could reconnect with my son.

  As I was cleaning up, while Landon colored another page in his new coloring book, my phone rang. For a second, I thought that it might be Mack—that she might have more courage than I had. Instead it was my sister Jessica.

  “Hey, Jess!” I balanced the phone on my shoulder and closed the door on the dishwasher, giving it a nudge to start. “What’s going on?”

  “I know I just saw you yesterday, but I swear these children of mine are going to drive me out of my mind and I have got to get out of this house.”

  I laughed, glancing at Landon, who was humming to himself. I only had the one kid—Jessica had four. “What did you have in mind?” I asked. It was almost seven at night, and while Landon needed to be in bed by nine, I thought that would give Jess plenty of time to decompress.

  “Come by my place, drop Landon off so that he can help my husband drain the energy out of my kids, and you and I will have some sibling bonding time over a nice cup of coffee far, far away from screaming children.”