Beach Day

43: Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Eve Eve Time

The lab is similar, but that's her playground. It's the place where she's in control, where focus comes naturally and easily, where the whirring of machinery brings her back to life. A stand mixer is a type of machine. A stove is a type of machine. She breathes in as easily as anything.

It's a good experience and a good afternoon. Tiff finds herself laughing more than she thought she could, letting herself go, decorating cookies oddly just because she can and her meemaw thinks it's charming. When her cousin and younger brother show up, they split off— Matt to the backyard to engage in a little good-old-fashioned Christmas roughhousing with Drew (they're just trying to assemble the tree), Andy to the kitchen to join his sister, aunt, and grandmother. It's a wonderful scene, with Meemaw Hilda as a whirlwind of motion, Aunt Esther latticing a pie to freeze and bake later, Tiff alternating between closing hand pies and decorating sugar cookie snowflakes at the table, and Andy slotting in easily with delicate crystals of colored sugar from the bottles in the spice cabinet. Old habits and new co-mingle amid songs and sleigh bells on the radio and stories swapped and laughter shared.

If she doesn't think about it, she finds herself genuinely smiling and happy, maybe for the first time since she got here. When Andy smiles the way he used to, when her grandmother sings off-key— it's enough to get her to understand what they say in church when they say the kitchen is a holy place, a hearth of familial love and care. Even if it's tainted by what her grandfather has done and the church's weird opinions about the kitchen being meant for women, it's still there. It's inescapable. For once, she isn't running away from it.

She holds up the latest completed cookie— a divergence from the norm, a snowflake decorated like a Newtonian atom, with bits of green mixed from a little blue and way too much yellow. Grining, she turns it to show her aunt and Andy.

Aunt Esther nods, seemingly pleased by it. (Good. Tiff doesn't know what she would do if her aunt disapproved.) Andy nods, too, and shows her a little snowman. He didn't decorate it well, but it isn't like that matters. It's Christmas Eve Eve. It's going to get eaten anyway. Some way or another, someone is going to eat it. And they'll love it as much as she does.

Andy, behind his glasses, narrows his eyes at her.

Tiff isn't sure why, at first. She's sure she looks a sight anyway— black t-shirt covered in flour from rolling out dough, glasses pushed up and back into her hair— but that isn't it. After a second, he asks, "I've been thinking about this all day. What happened to your eye?"

"Oh. Well." She struggles in her search for a lie. "Nothing."

"It's clearly not nothing."

"Andy, it doesn't matter." She knows he isn't going to accept that as an answer, but she doesn't have a better one. It isn't like she can tell the truth. He may have heard some of it the day before when she was trying to get him out of the woods, but that doesn't mean she has to explain— and it doesn't mean she has to let everyone in the room in on what's going on. Meemaw Hilda certainly doesn't need to know. Peepaw, wherever he is, doesn't need to know more than he already does. Aunt Esther is probably worried enough about the things that have been going on. She doesn't need to know the details of what she couldn't do.

But Andy knows her tells as well as she knows his. It's a side effect of growing up the way they did. Lying to their parents just to keep the peace means they know— not that he would need some deep, cosmic understanding of Tiff as a person to know she's trying to deflect.

She sighs at his frowning, and can't stand to disappoint him. Tiff leans in, whispers, "I just got hurt. It isn't anything to worry about, I promise. I'm fine. I'm just clumsy." She pauses again. Knowing the kid is prone to worry, she adds, "Nobody hurt me. I promise. It was a gun mishap. That's all."