“Yes! And we can make a new one for him, too.” Marnie started to run for the back door.
“Gloves, hat, and jacket first, please.”
“Ugh!”
An eternity later, we made it into the backyard, where Marnie immediately began to explain how the five misshapen snowmen were “Daddy, Mommy, Uncle Nicky, Steph, and me.” There was enough fresh powder for her to scrape together a starter ball. “Help us make a you, Max!”
“You got it,” Max said. He let Marnie work on rolling her ball around and started a new one then handed it to Steph, who was following him around like a duckling. “Do you want to help me get it going?” he asked her gently. She nodded, and they started to roll it around together. I watched them until Marnie loudly reminded me that we needed three balls for a snowman, so I had to do one, too.
The powder was fresh, but it was too cold for it to stick well. In the end, Max’s snowman ended up being about the same height as Steph’s, but he didn’t seem to mind. We found sticks for the arms, carved a face into it, and then drew on a suit jacket and tie. “Very fancy,” I said with a chuckle.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“We’re all very beautiful, but we could be more beautiful,” Marnie said critically. “Can we use some food coloring on them?”
That threw me for a bit of a loop, but… “Sure. Let me go and get it.”
After I handed over the basic red, yellow, blue, and green bottles, Max and I both stood back and watched as the girls experimented with the dyes, spattering drops, squeezing streaks and making attempts to mix them into new colors in the snow. Five minutes in, it looked like a rainbow had been brutally murdered by our snowman crime family, but the girls were having a fantastic time.
“I’m not sorry that they’re handling this part by themselves,” Max said quietly from his place beside me. “I love them, but this is the only jacket I brought.” It was a luxurious one, too, way nicer than my old camo coat, with a sheepskin collar and dark brown leather that looked like it would feel silky soft under my hand.
Or someone’s hand.
Anyone’s hand.
“It’s nice that they’re old enough to entertain themselves pretty well most of the time,” I agreed. “Marnie is really good at including Steph.”
Max looked contemplative. “I remember how adamant Ariel was that she was done after Marnie. Hal told me he’d basically given up on more kids, and then all of a sudden she changed her mind on Marnie’s second birthday.”
I didn’t want to talk about Ariel—I already knew I didn’t have anything nice to say. “She’s never been really consistent,” I managed in an even tone. Max glanced sidelong at me, one eyebrow raised. Shit, maybe that hadn’t been even enough. I knew he’d been friendly with her, not just for Hal’s sake, either—he and Ariel had run the drama club back in high school.
“Talk to me a little about Steph.”
Thank goodness for people who read the room. Not that Steph was a particularly easy subject right now, either, but she was better than talking about her mother. “About the not-talking thing?”
He nodded.
I exhaled harshly. “She hasn’t handled her mom’s departure very well,” I said. “Ariel dropped her off at kindergarten that morning. She was supposed to be back to pick her up at noon, and of course she didn’t show. The teacher tried to call her, and when that didn’t work, she called Hal. He called me, I got the rest of the cops involved, and we started a search.
“The whole time, Hal had to be strong for Steph, tell her that Mommy was fine, that she was going to be back soon, though he was worried she’d driven into a ditch somewhere.” I shook my head. “Marnie was more obviously bothered by it all when she found out that Ariel was missing, while Steph…she internalized it, in some way. By the time Ariel made contact three days later, Steph had completely stopped communicating. She didn’t say a damn word to her mother over the phone.” Ariel had cried. But if anyone deserved to cry over this clusterfuck, it was her.
“Steph is communicating with her counselor some now, though, and she’s participating in school again. She’ll speak every once in a while to Marnie, and sometimes to Hal, but for the most part, she stays quiet.” It was disconcerting, watching my niece go from a bubbly, outgoing girl to a silent, grave little phantom of a child. Five-year-olds were meant to be exuberant, and I sometimes worried that Ariel had stolen her daughter’s vivacity when she abandoned her.
Max winced and shook his head. “I can’t believe she put everyone through that. That’s rough.”
It was, but dwelling on it wasn’t going to make things any better. Ariel was out of the picture for good now. We had to work at moving on, and I was determined not to look back. “She’s getting better,” I said firmly. “She’s got Hal and Marnie, and she’s got me.” I glanced at Max. “She seems to like you, too.”
Max smiled, and the mood lightened along with his expression. “Steph’s always been my buddy. Marnie is everyone’s friend, but her little sister had a reputation of being choosy from infanthood. I was sure the first time I met her that she was going to hate me. She was just six months old, and she hadn’t even let Christine hold her for more than five minutes without yelling her face red yet. When Hal handed her to me, though, I held her up and looked her in the eyes and…” He shrugged. “She settled for me right away, let me put her down to sleep that night without a single tear.”
“That was when they visited you in New York, right?” My vision of Max as a corporate shark with a swank Manhattan apartment wasn’t really jiving with the reality of Hal and his young family spending a long weekend with him there every year.
“Yeah. Hal and Ariel brought a travel cot for Steph and set up in my room, and Marnie and I sacked out on the couches in the living room.” I don’t know what my face looked like, but whatever it was made Max laugh. “What, you think I can afford more than one bedroom in New York City? I’m lucky the kitchen and the bathroom have most of a wall between them—they literally share a sink. It’s a long one, built into the same countertop, look.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled for a minute then handed it over to me.
There was the kitchen…and there was the bathroom…and there was… “What the hell?” I marveled. “How can the landlords get away with this setup?”
“You’d be stunned what you can get away with calling an apartment in New York,” Max said. “I went to law school with a guy who slept in a walled-off section of a locker room. He said all the tile made it pretty easy to keep clean, actually.”
“A used locker room? Like, an active one?” Max nodded with mock solemnity. “Jesus Christ, I’m feeling way better about having to deal with something as mundane as rats now.”