A Vineyard White Christmas

by Katie Winters

  “Well, you’ll get to the end, I guess. And then you’ll look back and say these were the best years of your life,” Laura said. “You’re so free. You don’t have to pay bills or nag little boys to brush their teeth.”

  Jonathon froze on the carpet. Slowly, he tilted his head up to face his mother, who arched her eyebrows playfully. “That’s right, Jonathon Montgomery. It’s time for you to get ready for bed.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jonathon affirmed. “I still have about two hours left of my game.”

  “Aren’t you the inventor of your game? It seems to me you can stop it now and start it back up again tomorrow,” Laura said.

  Jonathon stuck out his lower lip ominously. Over the years, Andrew had heard the kid perform some gut-wrenching screams, the kinds of things that deserved Oscars. This time, however, Steven bolted toward his son, grabbed him beneath his armpits, and tossed him in the air. The boy’s bad humor immediately switched as he yelped and giggled and romped.

  “Steve! You’re going to get him all wound up,” Laura said, standing with hands-on-hips. She gave her husband a warning glare just then.

  But Steven didn’t care, and Jonathon looked like he floated on air. When he fell again into his father’s arms, he dotted a kiss on his scruffy cheek and said, “You smell like cars, Daddy.”

  Like a spell, he was ready to go to bed.

  “I always smell like cars,” Steven said as he winked toward Andrew. “Your mother loves it.”

  Steven whisked Jonathon up the steps. There was the sound of his footsteps as he cut toward the bathroom; there was the sound of the sink as Steven instructed Jonathon on how to brush his teeth. Laura cleared her throat over the top of the table and gave Andrew a look that meant, Shouldn’t you be headed back home?

  Andrew took another swig of his beer and stood. “Thanks again for your hospitality, Laura. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Keep your chin up, kid,” Laura said. “We’re all rooting for you.”

  Her words followed Andrew back out into the April night. Graduation was a little over six weeks away, and it felt like the strangest finish line, one with a large hazy “what if” after it. Andrew zipped up his spring jacket and headed down the sidewalk with his hands crammed in his pockets. In just another week, he would be allowed back on the baseball field; in just another week, his pitches would whip through the air again.

  But that college scholarship? It wasn’t on offer anymore.

  Instead of heading straight home, Andrew paused outside of his sister Kelli’s house. There, she lived with her husband, Mike, their son, Sam, aged four, their other son, Josh, aged two, and their daughter, Lexi, who had been born in early January. Mike also worked in real estate—sometimes under their parents. Kelli was now twenty-eight years old, a responsible mother, and a business owner in her own right. She had opened a little boutique down the road the previous summer, which had become a success.

  Andrew loved all his siblings, but for reasons he had never understood, he loved Kelli the most. He supposed it was because she’d always been the kindest and always let him pour his heart out without being judgmental. She’d sat up with him long nights, some fifteen years ago: reading him stories and swapping out the names for his name and her name. When she’d been a teenager, in the midst of dating, he hadn’t liked anyone of her boyfriends and he had been surprised to find that he hated the man she had chosen for her husband even more.

  How had such a beautiful, intelligent, kind creature found any kind of love in Mike Williams?

  Andrew knew that Kelli’s door was always open for him. He headed up the little walkway that led to their front door, lifted his hand, and prepared to rap his knuckles.

  That moment, Mike’s voice rattled through the house.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Kelli? Are you serious right now?”

  Andrew froze. There was a loud, horrible sound, like the sound of someone throwing something across the room.

  “Mike, please. You’ll wake the baby.”

  “Mike, please. You’ll wake the baby,” Mike imitated her. “Do you hear yourself? You sound pathetic. Just admit it. You were flirting with him today when I came in. Weren’t you?”

  “No! I swear. I was just catching up. I haven’t seen him since high school, and...”

  “I saw it in your eyes. You wanted him, Kelli. Admit it.”

  “I love you, Mike. You’re jealous and you’re selfish, but I...”

  “Shut up!”

  Andrew froze with rage. That moment, the baby wailed from wherever she lay, somewhere in the front room. The light snapped on, and Andrew ducked down just as Kelli stepped into the room to collect Lexi and soothe her. He tried the door; he wanted to check on her, but it was locked.

  “Shh, honey. It’s okay,” Kelli breathed.

  “Whatever,” Mike called from the back room. “I’m going to bed.”

  Andrew listened as his horrible brother-in-law stomped up the staircase and left his wife and their howling daughter down below. When Andrew was sure Mike had gone, he rapped very delicately at the door until Kelli cracked it open to find him standing in front of her. Kelli’s eyes were hollow, as though she couldn’t see him at all.

  “Andrew, what are you doing here?” she rasped.

  “I wanted to say hello.” Andrew righted himself and tried to give her a smile, but it failed. “Are you okay?”

  “What? Of course, I’m okay,” she returned.

  “I just...I heard something and, well,” Andrew trailed off.

  In Kelli’s arms, Lexi turned over to burrow her head between her arm and chest. It was painfully cute. Andrew’s heart surged with love for the little thing.

  “Do you want anything? Some cereal?” Kelli asked. “I’m sorry I haven’t reached out after the whole baseball thing. It sounds so hard, though. You and Kurt always seem to get into so much trouble.”

  Andrew gave a sad shrug. He didn’t want to leave her. Not while she looked so sad. “Sure. I’ll take some cereal.”

  He found himself at her little kitchen table while she placed her daughter tenderly back in the bassinet. With tired arms, she poured them both bowls of Lucky Charms cereal, with just the tiniest bit of milk, just the way they’d always liked it.

  “Mike doesn’t like it when I buy the name brand cereal,” she said as she sat across from him. “So I hide it in the back of the cupboard. He never looks, and Sam loves it the best.”

  “Me too,” Andrew said. His spoon hovered over the glorious fake marshmallows and the little crunchy delights. He looked at his sister, really looked at her: at the hollow circles that sat beneath her eyes and the start of frown lines that crept up between her eyebrows. “You’d tell me if you need help, right?” he asked.

  Kelli pondered this as she chewed her first bite of cereal. “I just don’t know what you could do, Andy.”

  This stung. Andrew blinked back tears that had now formed. “I’m not a kid anymore,” he told her. “I’m about to graduate. And you don’t have to do this. Whatever it is.”

  Kelli heaved a sigh. “In many ways, I still feel like a kid, maybe even younger than you. But it’s all much more complicated than I could have anticipated. Fights mean a lot less than they used to. They just happen.”

  They just happen.

  He didn’t want to push the subject any further. He knew Kellie understood that he was there for her, that he knew her marriage was rocky at best with Michael. When he took one final glance at his sister, she looked exhausted and so he made his way to the door. It was time to leave.

  Andrew headed back to his house. His tongue was caked with the taste of sugary-sweet cereal. After he placed the key through the front door, he found only his mother in front of the television, with the remote control lifted.

  “Oh, good. You’re home,” she said. “Dad was worried we would get yet, another call that you were in trouble.”

  Chapter Three

  2003

  “Congratulations to the clas
s of 2003.”

  Principal Miller’s voice roared through the loudspeaker as the students, assembled across the football field, whipped their graduate hats toward a glorious blue sky. Andrew kept his in his hands and watched as the other graduate hats fluttered down around him, in odd directions, never landing back in the right place. With every thud of his heart, he knew: this was the end of something he would never get back. He wasn’t sure what to do with that.

  Kurt Leopold was just a few seats away from Andrew Montgomery. When they got the all-clear to head out on their “life adventures” alone, Kurt jumped toward Andrew and hugged him wildly.

  “Man, we did it! We made it. I thought we would never do it, but here we are.”

  Andrew and Kurt walked together toward the bleachers, where their families waited for them in their Sunday best. Andrew caught his father’s eyes as he approached; the man tried out a smile, but it looked odd on his face, especially since he hadn’t managed a smile for his youngest son since the whole “drinking on the baseball field” incident.

  Andrew’s mother threw herself around Andrew and said, “Congratulations, honey. You looked great up there. We’re so proud of you.”

  “You mean for the split-second that I marched across the stage?” Andrew asked.

  “Come on, Little Bro,” Steven said. He wrapped his arm around Andrew’s shoulder and tugged him into a hug. “Don’t give Mom a hard time.”

  “Thanks. Um.” He swallowed the lump in his throat and added, “Thank you all for being here. It means a lot to me.”

  “Only an hour till the party starts,” his mother said. “We’d better get back to finish setting everything up. All the Sheridans will be there, along with your father’s family, and all your friends.”

  Andrew’s heart thudded with dread. He hated the concept of a graduation party: all those people smacking his shoulder, congratulating him, telling him it was time for him to “become a great man like his father.” Plus, there was all that pressure of it being a party. A time his parents had set aside to spend money on him, bring in nice cakes and fancy foods and coolers of beer for the family.

  He had to clench his teeth and get through it.

  After the party, the rest of his life would begin.

  He wasn’t so keen on that, either.

  THE PARTY WAS ELABORATE, only the kind of thing the Montgomery family would put together to show off just how wealthy they had become in recent years. At least, that’s how it seemed to Andrew. Everyone else was off to the races on having a good time. As his mother brought out the cake, Claire and Charlotte rushed up to hug him again and rustle his hair, just as they had done when he was much younger.

  “I can’t believe it! You graduated!” Charlotte said as she leaned back into the arms of Jason, the love of her life.

  “Fantastic work, man,” Jason said. Like Steven with the auto shop, Jason always seemed to smell the tiniest bit like fish.

  “Seriously, I hope you know we’re proud of you,” Claire said as she lowered her voice. “I know Dad has put a lot of pressure on you over the past year. But you have to know; it’s just because there’s been so much pressure on him and his career. All those big clients, looking to him for help... He still loves you, you know?”

  Kurt and his sister, Beth, appeared on the far side of the party. Andrew’s whole body sizzled with electricity at the sight of them.

  “I’ll catch you guys later,” he told his sisters before he headed over, grabbing a few beers along the way. Who could stop him? It was his graduation, after all.

  “Hey, man!” Kurt said. “Beth wanted to come. Hope that’s cool.”

  “Of course,” Andrew said. He smiled sheepishly at this beautiful, radiant girl, the girl with the boyfriend, and added, “Thanks for coming. Want a beer?”

  “Thanks.” Beth took it slowly and cracked it open. Her eyes told him something—something that intrigued him.

  She liked him.

  He knew it in his core.

  “Lots of people are here,” Kurt said as he scanned the crowd.

  “My father made sure of that,” Andrew said.

  All the while, his eyes remained on Beth’s.

  “It’s so weird to see your brother and sisters so much older now, with their own kids,” Kurt continued.

  “Tell me about it,” Andrew said. “To Beth, he said, “I’m Uncle Andy these days..”

  “You must be the best uncle,” Beth said. Her cheeks brightened to a pink shade. “I mean, they must love you a lot.”

  Andrew wasn’t sure, in retrospect, how it happened. Inch by inch, second by second, somehow, he and Beth ended up alone in the corner of the backyard, both sipping beers, talking to each other in a way that only the two of them made it feel as though they were the only two in the entire universe. Andrew had no idea where Kurt was; in fact, if asked at that moment, he might have said, “Kurt? Never heard of him.”

  Ultimately, he and Beth ended up together in the long hallway that led toward his bedroom: their lips pressed together, their breath hot and urgent.

  Only then did his mother make a move for the stairwell to call up and say, “Andrew! All your guests are waiting down here. You have to say hello to everyone and thank them for stopping by.”

  Their kiss broke as Beth chuckled softly and stroked his face. “They always know, don’t they?”

  “That woman always has a pretty good hunch,” Andrew whispered. “Can I find you after the party?”

  “Of course.”

  Andrew cradled her tenderly for a long moment. Perplexed, he said, “I thought you had a boyfriend?”

  Beth shrugged. “Things change, don’t they?”

  “I guess that’s one of the only constants in this life,” Andrew returned before walking back downstairs.

  Andrew fell in-line with his father, Steven, his Uncle Wes, and Jason. Jason spoke about a recent catch he had made out on the water, “the biggest trout he’d ever seen in his life.” His father suggested that Andrew do a little internship with the fishing company that summer. “Something to get your hands dirty while you think about what you want to do next.”

  Andrew’s stomach twisted up with nerves. He made eye contact with Jason as he said, “I’ll have to think about that.”

  “It’s no trouble if you’re not interested,” Jason said hurriedly. “I only mentioned it to your father because he said you struggled with what to do next. I said I don’t think I would have known what to do if my parents hadn’t owned this fishing company. I fell into it and it fit me like a glove. It doesn’t fit everyone, of course.”

  Andrew wanted to give his father a dark look, one that translated just how little he liked his future discussed with random others. Instead, his Uncle Wes rapped him on the back and yanked his attention in that direction.

  “But I also just told your father here that we always need extra staff at the Sunrise Cove over the summer,” he said. “That place is difficult to keep up with, especially now that all the girls have run off to find themselves.” His eyes grew hazy with sadness, even as his smile remained plastered on.

  Andrew knew how much pain his Uncle Wes had gone through: from his wife’s drowning to the one-by-one abandonment of Susan, then Christine, and then finally, Lola. Andrew’s memories of the girls had grown blurry over the years. Susan had been nearly ten years older than him; she had left when he was only nine years old—a beautiful, terribly depressed creature, already with a family of her own in New Jersey.

  “Thanks, but I’ll have to think about that too, Uncle Wes,” Andrew heard himself say.

  His father’s eyes grew stormy. “Andrew hasn’t worked much the past year.”

  “I held down that lifeguard job till the end of the season,” Andrew interjected.

  “All you did was flirt with the tourist girls,” his father insisted. “And get a good suntan.”

  Actually, I saved an older man’s life. I tugged his lifeless form out of a particularly frantic wave and found him soggy and pale
and almost lifeless. Only when I stretched him out on the beach did the water burst from his lips like a fountain.

  “Right. Yep. That’s all I did.” Andrew felt on the verge of exploding. He gripped a beer from the cooler and twisted off the top a little too aggressively.

  “Time for you to join the real world,” his father said. “It’s time for all these fun and games to come to an end.”

  Andrew had to escape his father’s presence and found himself toward the side of the party as the moon strung itself up in the cavernous night sky. Conversations purred around one another and became a kind of beehive of sound. He couldn’t articulate anything and had no desire to join a single conversation. Both Kurt and Beth had run off to another graduation party, both insisting that he catch up with them after his own guests left.

  Andrew walked back into the side entrance of the large house to use the bathroom. In the darkness of the hallway, he heard hissing, bad language, and the kind of volatility that made the walls shake. He froze and focused on the words.

  “You have no idea how you embarrassed me out there. Are you serious right now? I came all the way here to celebrate your loser brother’s graduation, and this is how you treat me?”

  Mike.

  Andrew crept closer to the source. Mike and Kelli stood in the dark grey haze of the kitchen. Kelli had her hands stretched over her cheeks as Mike belittled her.

  “You’re pathetic,” Mike blared. “I don’t know what kind of example you think you’re giving our children.”

  Andrew shoved himself the rest of the way into the kitchen with his fists raised. Before Mike had a chance to speak, he used all the anger that had generated over the previous hours to smash Mike directly in the nose. Mike fell back with a funny, childlike look smeared across his face. He landed against the counter and howled. Blood rained out of his nose.

  “Andrew!” Kelli cried. She leaped for Mike—the man who had only just berated her!—and grabbed his shoulder to ask him if he was okay. Mike’s eyes looked like malevolent stones or gems.