I just keep walking and don’t respond right away. Not while we’re this close to the house, where any one of her sisters could be listening at a window, just waiting for something interesting to happen.
“And it can’t be good for the environment,” she says, pulling her keys from her pocket, pointing them at her car and unlocking it. “Besides, what happens if you get hurt somewhere only accessible by helicopter? I guess the helicopter has to get you back out, but that seems pretty dicey.”
Finally, next to her car, she stops. I shove one hand into my coat pocket, the other holding the now-clean pie dish.
“Were you going to tell me?” I ask, an edge sliding into my voice. “Or were you just going to disappear for the weekend?”
“I forgot,” she says, and her eyes dart away. “It’s this annual thing, and it’s been in my calendar but I didn’t realize it was that soon —"
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not —”
“Not a single person in that room believes that I have to help Levi pick out wedding chairs,” I say.
“That’s because you came up with the worst lie I’ve ever heard.”
“You made me lie!”
I’m loud, too loud, and we both look over at the house. Nothing moves. I shove a hand through my hair.
“I didn’t mean to,” she says, quiet but strained. “I didn’t want my fucking sister to go and invite you in the first place, but I didn’t want them thinking that we’re on the rocks or something.”
“And fuck what I think, right?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“But you’ll keep secrets and then have me lie to cover for you.”
Delilah heaves a deep breath. Her cheeks are flaming, even in the dark, her eyes too shiny, her lips too red. Always an angry crier.
“We’ve been dating for a month and you’re mad that I’m not bringing you on my family vacation?” she says, stepping closer to me, her breath frosting in the air. “Tell me. In your blank slate, start over scheme, would you bring a brand new girlfriend who you’d never even slept with on a vacation with your entire family?”
“I’d at least tell her I was going,” I say. “If I brought her around my family, I’d at least give her some warning. And yeah, I might invite her if I thought she was worth keeping.”
Delilah’s eyes wobble, her whole face bright red, and all the muscles in her jaw twitch.
“Goddamn,” she says, and a single tear spills out.
She turns away from me, hair flying, and walks away.
“Del —”
“Stay there!” she shouts over her shoulder.
At the edge of the driveway, by a tall, cylindrical tree, she stops.
Delilah stares at the tree. Or, at least, it looks like she’s staring at the tree because her back is to me. She stares at the tree for a minute, then two.
Finally, she comes back, stands in front of me, clears her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should’ve at least told you I was going. It wasn’t my intention to hurt your feelings.”
I’m thunderstruck. Delilah and I have gotten in more fights than I can count, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her apologize before. I look at the tree — maybe it’s possessed? — and then back at her.
“Thank you,” I say.
“That was a breathing thing I learned in therapy,” she explains, waving a hand at the tree. “It’s to… I can be really… you know.”
“I do know.”
Delilah snorts. She takes another deep breath.
“They’re crazy and you don’t even ski,” she says, her voice quiet. “I didn’t want you to feel like you had to come and then listen to Michael talk incessantly about heliskiing and polo, or discuss a nursery in great detail, or politely ignore ten hundred thousand million hints about finally making an honest woman out of me. Ava’s been married for what, six weeks? and they’re already after her about kids. They’re a lot, and they stress me out, and I didn’t want to make you have to deal with it yet.”
I believe her. I just witnessed her family in action for a few hours, and she’s right. But all the same there’s the shadow of a whisper, deep in the back of my mind, saying you’re not a family vacation kind of boyfriend and if she were serious, none of that would matter.
I push those away, stuff them back into a pit, and I reach out and brush my fingers along her cheek.
“Delilah,” I say, softly. “Have you met my family? They’re the definition of a lot.”
She smiles, finally.
“It’s completely different,” she says. “I don’t think my sisters know what a trebuchet even is. I didn’t until Rusty showed me the diagrams. But your brothers don’t act like your opinion doesn’t count if you’re not married.”
It’s true. My family is remarkably pressure-free, at least in that arena. Even when Daniel accidentally knocked someone up, no one wanted him to marry her.
“I really did forget it was in two weeks,” she says. “I thought I still had a month or something. I’ve been distracted lately.”
I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish it were as simple as Delilah thinking he’s my boyfriend, he should come.
But I let it go. I give her a kiss and we get into her car, and I remind myself about the blank slate, that nothing before this matters, and Delilah pulls around her parents’ driveway, down the tree-lined lane, and away.
The first snowflake falls on Delilah’s windshield when we’re halfway back to my house, and she frowns at it.
“I thought Dad said it wasn’t starting until after midnight,” she says, anchoring both hands on the steering wheel.
“Could it be that the Weather Channel was wrong?” I say, and she laughs.
“I bet we’ll hear about it,” she says. “He loves to complain when people make wrong guesses about an inherently chaotic system.”
More snowflakes fall. Delilah’s hands tighten on the wheel. I fiddle with the windshield defroster so she doesn’t have to look away from the road.
Within five minutes, it’s pouring snow. Delilah’s white-knuckling the steering wheel, going thirty miles an hour on the dark country roads, already gone gray with fallen snow.
“Should I turn around and go back?” she asks, voice tense.
I pull my phone out to check the map, just to be sure, but I’m right: we’re closer to my house than to their estate.
“Do you want me to drive?” I offer.
“Are you any better at snow driving than me?” she asks.
“I doubt it.”
“If someone’s gonna drive my car into a ditch, it should probably be me,” she say, and then we both fall silent again.
The snow keeps falling, thick and heavy, blanketing the road in what seems like minutes. There are no other tires tracks. We pass two other cars in the next twenty minutes, both of us tense and on high alert.
I have to remind myself to breathe. I have to remind myself that even if we go around a curve and hit something, we’re not going fast enough to do ourselves much damage. That safety features in cars have come a long way in the past twenty years and at worst, one of us will break a bone.