“Well, I just feel like all the stuff I’ve accomplished isn’t the right stuff for you,” she said. “Like you’d be more proud of me—”
“Stop. Right there. I am proud. So proud.” Mom put her hand over Josie’s. “I’ve messed this up. Honey…” She took a deep breath. “I only want you to be happy.”
“I’m happy.”
A smile teased Mom’s lips and Josie understood why. Nothing about the way she’d said those words was convincing. But Josie refused to smile and Mom’s smile slowly vanished. And they went back to sipping coffee and looking out over mountains.
“Can I say one more thing?” Delia asked.
“Can I stop you?” Now she was smiling. God. Mom did not change. The phrase dog with a bone came to mind.
“You’re too good for that show. Too talented. You have big, beautiful ideas and a big, beautiful brain and heart, and you always have.”
“That’s a nice vote of confidence, Mom, but there are a thousand of me in the city.”
“Never,” Mom said fiercely and grabbed Josie’s hand to kiss it. “Never.”
Oh, in staying away from the Riverview she’d also been staying away from her mom, which was a little like starving herself of faith and affection. No one believed in her like her mother, and that kind of power source was sadly lacking in her Queens apartment.
Everyone’s mom thought they were extraordinary and she’d gotten used to not having the pressure of living up to that.
“I remember when Max and I dropped you at NYU, and it was like watching your whole life just expand right in front of our eyes. I was so excited for you. You have always been meant for more than the Riverview.”
Josie remembered that day, too. The way the three of them had looked at each other with such awareness and excitement. All of them on the edge of a moment.
“I always appreciated how you didn’t cry,” Josie said.
“Cried like a baby when we got in the car.”
“I figured.” The secret about the show was on the tip of her tongue. And she realized Mom would be happy for her whether her idea was made real or not. She’d be proud of Josie for trying. For pushing for more. So, what was the harm in telling Mom? It would only make Mom happy. An early Christmas present. “Mom?”
Max came out of the long hallway leading to the bedrooms and stopped. “Well, that’s a sight,” he said, putting his hands on his hips.
“No crying, Max,” Mom said. She rolled her eyes at Josie and got up to kiss Max like they hadn’t seen each other in days.
Josie looked back out the window. Tomorrow. I’ll tell her tomorrow, she thought, listening to them whisper to each other the way they always did.
How’d you sleep?
Good. You?
Weird dream about foxes all over the property. They kept trying to get in the house.
That is weird. Freudian.
You think everything is Freudian.
Coffee?
Please.
All she’d ever wanted was what Max and Delia had. Gabe and Alice, Daphne and Jonah. Even Grandma and Grandpa.
A purposeful life.
And a love that could survive everything that got thrown at it.
The great curveball that fate had thrown her way was that she really believed she’d met that person when she was just a kid.
An hour later Max, Dom, and Josie were headed out into the woods to find a Christmas tree. Mom had loaned Josie some boots and a thick winter coat after determining that what Josie had brought from the city was not enough. She was grateful for the boots. And the coat was one of those long ones that went down to her ankles like a giant sleeping bag.
“We need two trees,” Max said.
“For what?” Dom asked. He was in the back seat, hood up, head against door, eyes closed. He’d woken up about ten minutes ago and looked like he could go right back to sleep. God. To be a teenager again. Josie was lucky if she got five good hours a night.
“Well, son,” Max said, glancing in the rearview mirror as they bounced over the uneven dirt road. “Not sure if you noticed, but we don’t have a tree up in our place, either.”
“We don’t?” Dom asked, cracking one eye.
Max and Josie shared a laughing look. Dom was fourteen, and unless it was food or hockey related, he didn’t seem to notice it.
“How’s school?” Josie asked her brother, reaching back to shake his knee.
“Fine.” He shifted out of the way. “How is New York City?”
“Amazing. You should come visit me.”
Dom opened one eye again. “For real?”
“For real,” Josie said. Dom could use a little New York in his life. And it had been a very long time since she’d spent any time with him, one on one. The perils of being born so many years apart. They were like strangers who looked alike.
“Hold on,” Max said. “The two of you running around New York City unchaperoned—”
“Max, I’m twenty-four.”
“And I’m fourteen.”
“You’re not helping, Dom.” Josie laughed at her brother, who grinned at her.
“I’d love to come. We could see a Rangers game.”
“Well, I was thinking maybe a Broadway show. Go to some museums.”
“And then a Rangers game. And a hot dog. From a cart.”
“Oh my god, Alice would die,” Josie said. They bounced down a gravel road covered with snow, heading deeper into the forest. Boughs of pine trees slapped against the sides of the truck.
“What we eat in New York, stays in New York,” Dom said.
“Particularly if it’s street meat,” Max said.
“How is hockey?” Josie asked, having put off the only question that really mattered in her brother’s life.
He perked right up, and for the next ten minutes Josie got a rundown on hockey stuff she barely understood—but looking at her brother’s happy, smiling face was more than enough information.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “We’ll go to a Rangers game.”
“I want to come too,” Max said.
“You’re not invited.”
He pretended to be aghast. But she knew he was thrilled. He and Mom worried about the two of them being born so far apart and never being able to figure out their common ground.
“How is the city treating you?” Max asked.
She laughed. “Like it doesn’t know I’m there? How is a city supposed to treat me?”
He glanced over, his eyes smiling. “Just making sure you still like it.”
What she liked about it she didn’t get to experience much anymore. When she was younger there had always been something new to see. Something completely different. Fun. Neighborhoods and markets. Book readings and Off-Off-Broadway plays. Museums. She even used to do those walking tours, visiting historic crime scenes. Or those food tours through Chinatown. She’d jumped into all of it.
“I’m just really busy,” she said, looking out the window. Max let it go.
Finally, they stopped, surrounded by snow and pine trees. The sky was slate gray above them. The trees so green they were nearly black. “All right,” he said. “We need a ten-footer for the lodge and a smaller one for our house. I’ve got—”