"Rosebud, are you sure this is such a good idea?" Her Pop's voice was gentle, and he was very careful not to sound judgmental in any way.
They were back at home, and well into Christmas Vacation.
"What do you mean? Are you saying you think I can't do it?" Ruthie asked, and, Pop's efforts notwithstanding, she sounded hurt.
And offended and pissed.
"No no," he hastened to assure her. "You can do anything, anything, I believe that. But this is a difficult thing to learn, right? Takes some practice? It might be too much, even for you, given the time constraint, that's all I'm saying."
"It's not rocket science," Ruthie said, her voice sharper than she intended, because she loved her Pop more than anything. "I mean, senior citizens who only have half their minds left do it, you know? And people in institutions and stuff do it just to freakin' relax. How hard can it be?"
They were staring at the angled mess of emerald green yarn in Ruthie's lap. Clarence Darrow was also staring, with great interest, though Ruthie did try to keep pushing him away.
She had decided that, since she was supposed to stay off her leg, she was going to spend the next week crocheting Elliott a scarf as a Christmas present.
"He doesn't have one. He told me. I mean," she continued, plucking at the yarn and making Clarence's eyes dilate, "he said he had one, back in England, but he left it there because he was coming to California and he didn't think he'd need one."
Elliott hadn't counted on the Central Valley fog, known as Tulle Fog, which was so dense sometimes people were reduced to driving slowly with their car doors open so they could see the center line on the road.
"I know, honey, and I admire the sentiment, but this might take even you longer than a week," Pop said, rubbing the top of her head.
But Ruthie shook her head. "No, I read about it. Knitting is time-consuming, and really hard, but crocheting is much faster, and easier to do, coordination-wise." She picked up her hook, and looked again at the pile of yarn in her lap.
Clarence crept closer, while Amal Clooney watched him stalk the yarn with great interest, snout on her paws, ears perked attentively.
"Well, first off, I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be in a big blob like that," Pop said, sitting down next to her. "How'd that happen? It didn't look like that when we got home from the yarn store."
"I was supposed to wind it into a ball first, but I thought I'd save time and just use it like it came, but be really careful," Ruthie admitted. "Then a big tangled blob came out of the middle, and while I was trying to fix it, this happened." She gestured toward her lap. Her iPad sat next to her, open to a YouTube video on crocheting a man's scarf.
"Lesson learned, I guess," Pop said with a smile.
"Yeah," Ruthie said. She sounded defeated and tired, the way she used to sound in the evenings when she'd swum for two hours, but still had piano, voice, and homework ahead of her.
"Here, I did a bit of yarn work myself when I was young," Pop told her. "I helped my Grammy. So how about if I work on this tangle, and you keep watching the video and working?"
"But how?" Ruthie's hand flapped at the yarn, making Clarence Darrow nearly go crazy. "It's all connected." She sounded close to tears.
"I'll cut this part off, fix it, and we can weave it back in. I don't remember much, but I remember how to weave ends together," Pop assured her.
Ruthie gave him a look of pure gratitude.
In this way they passed the afternoon, with Ruthie swearing frequently and loudly at the video, at the yarn, the hook, even her own hands.
❄️🎄🎁🎄🎁🎄🎁🎄❄️
"I'm not going, okay? My phone is off, so if he calls the house, just tell him I ran away or something," Ruthie called down the stairs, her voice quavering. "Better yet, just tell him I died, okay?" There was a thudding of steps as she ran back to her room.
"Ruth Barakat Grimaldi," her dad called. "Come back downstairs right now, please."
And because both of her parents used her full name so rarely, Ruthie obeyed, feet dragging as she grasped the banister.
"What?" she asked, sniffing.
"He's not going to call you," her Pop told her.
"How do you do know?" she countered, with another gigantic sniff. "How do you know he didn't get me the perfect gift? How do you know he's not dialing the--"
"Because he's here," Pop answered, turning to her from the open door.
"What?" Ruthie turned to scamper back up the stairs, but this time it was Elliott who called her.
"Ruthie, get down here, please. Please?" He smiled at her through the open door, and he'd never looked more handsome to Ruthie. He was wearing a beautiful cream-colored sweater with a pattern of holly around the collar.
"No, I don't want to," she said, even as she walked toward him. "I've been crying, my eyes are swollen nearly shut, my nose looks like a maraschino cherry, my hair looks like poo--"
"You hair?" Elliott asked, confused. "What does that have to do with the fact you've been crying?"
"It doesn't, it just looks like--like--poo," Ruthie said dismally, wiping her nose again.
She saw the brightly colored packages he was holding and burst into fresh tears. "You can't give me those," she told him.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't have anything for you," she replied, stopping a few feet from the open door. Her words were nearly impossible to understand.
"Really?" Elliott asked, smiling as Phil faded quietly into the kitchen. "Because that's not what I heard." He stepped in and put his arms around his miserable girl. "A little bird told me that you did have something, but that you didn't feel confident about giving it to me."
"A little bird?" Ruthie looked distrustfully toward the kitchen.
"Okay, maybe a very handsome solicitor of Egyptian descent," Elliott amended. "And Pepsi."
"Fucking Pepsi," Ruthie muttered. "I told her not to tell."
"You know Pepsi can't keep a secret," Elliott continued with a laugh. "Now go get my gift, put on something warmer, and come for a walk with me, yeah?" He lifted her curls off her shoulder.
So Ruthie went and put on Elliott's Book of Mormon hoodie that she was currently borrowing, grabbed the gift bag, splashed some water on her face, and met him at the front door.
"That's better," Elliott said, putting an arm around her and opening the door.
"We won't be gone long," he called toward Phil.
"Okay. And I'm heading upstairs in a minute, so you can come warm up in the living room after your walk if you want," he told Ruthie, dropping a kiss on her head.
They began walking in the cold, foggy night, as the damp began to work its way into their bodies.
"You need to know right now that I'm not giving this to you, no matter what you say," Ruthie said defiantly as they walked.
"Well, that's your prerogative, I suppose, but I must admit, I'll be very, very sad," Elliott told her, taking her gloved hand in his.
"Do you want your gifts, anyway?" he asked as they walked.
"Gifts? Plural? You got me two, and I don't have any, that's just great," Ruthie lamented, her voice wobbling toward tears again.
"No, no, no more crying, this is supposed to be a happy time, please," Elliott begged. He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders. "So do you want them or no?" he repeated.
Slowly, reluctantly, Ruthie nodded. She shivered as she accepted the presents.
"Let's just go back to your house and open the gifts in front of the fire," he suggested, putting an arm around her and holding her close.
"Okay," she answered, teeth chattering.
So they returned to the house a scant ten minutes after they'd left. Phil was already upstairs, the fire banked and glowing. Clarence and Amal were sharing the big dog bed, snuggled together.
Ruthie looked at the two presents she was holding. "Does it matter which I open first?" she asked.
Elliott shook his head, so she began opening the larger one, which she could already tell was a book.
It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's biography, My Own Words, which Ruthie didn't own yet, though she'd been hoping her dads would get it for her for Christmas.
"Oh, Elliott, this is wonderful," she said, smiling for the first time that evening.
"Open it," he encouraged, so she did.
"To my namesake, Ruthie Barakat Grimaldi: sounds like we might be meeting at some point in the future. I'll look forward to it, young lady."
Her name was signed underneath with a flourish.
"Oh my god, how did you get this?" Ruthie asked. Even her dads, with all their connections, didn't know the Hon. RBG herself.
"I have my ways, which will remain secret, to preserve my aura of mystery," Elliott replied with a dashing smile.
"Now open the other one, okay?"
"I can't, I can't take two from you when I don't even have one," Ruthie protested.
Elliott shushed her with a finger over her lips.
Ruthie finally nodded and tore open the much smaller box. Inside was a finely wrought chain with a silver charm hanging from it. Ruthie lifted it out to look at it more carefully.
It was a charm depicting the two faces of theatre, of comedy and tragedy, worked in silver.
"How beautiful!" she declared. "It it a necklace?" It seemed too small to be a necklace, but too big to be a bracelet.
"It's for your ankle," Elliott explained. "And there's an inscription on the back."
Ruthie turned it over, and read, in the light from the dying fire, "Love, ET," in the tiniest imaginable script.
"I wanted to give you things that reflected both sides of your personality," he explained.
Elliott took it from her, pushed her pant leg up and her sock down, and attached it to her ankle.
"Perfect," he declared, leaning in to kiss Ruthie.
She, too, leaned into the kiss, holding it longer.
They finally came apart to smile at each other.
Elliott looked at her expectantly.
"No," Ruthie said. "I can't give it to you, especially after these beautiful gifts you gave me."
"Don't be a goose," Elliott told her, reaching for the bag.
He pulled out the scarf, in the most beautiful emerald green. Even in the firelight, the mistakes were obvious, there were openings in the pattern where Ruthie had dropped stitches, or flat out made mistakes that she was unable to correct.
Ruthie's eyes teared up again she looked at it. "I wanted it to be so beautiful," she told him. "I wanted it to be perfect, but I suck, I suck at crochet, and I couldn't."
She leaned into his sweater, inhaling the scent of him. "I'm so sorry," she whispered.
She felt him shaking, and realized that he was laughing.
"Why are you laughing at my misery?" she asked, sitting up.
"I'm laughing because you are the most wonderful, adorable, marvelous, loving girlfriend I've ever had," Elliott told her, dropping a kiss on her nose. "I've never, ever, had anyone, including my own mum, make me something to wear, something to keep me warm, like this.
"I think it's absolutely wonderful," he told her. "And I'll tell you a little secret, shall I?" At Ruthie's nod, he continued. "We had a housekeeper, Masha, her name was, and I used to watch her fix things like this all the time."
"These mistakes can't be fixed," Ruthie told him. "This scarf looks like it's been set upon by ravenous wolverines or something, Elliott."
"No, you're right, there's no way to make the weave consistent, but that's not the only way to salvage this," he told her. "Grab the yarn and a hook, and I'll show you."
So Ruthie came back with the hook and a ball of green yarn. "Watch," Elliott told her. He used the hook to pull the yarn through the edges of a hole, and pulled the whole thing tight when he was finished and tied it off.
"It still shows, though," Ruthie protested. "You can totally see it, it looks like a spider, right in the middle."
"A snowflake, not a spider," Elliott told her. He kept going, working at pulling the numerous holes closed, sometimes with the extra yarn, sometimes with just the yarn in the scarf itself. By the time he was finished, the scarf did, indeed look a little better, interesting, if not perfect.
"See?" Elliott told her. "And you made so many mistakes, in such random places, that it looks like a free-form pattern, doesn't it? Almost like you did it on purpose?"
And it did, look quite original, albeit a little odd.
"And you'd wear this?" she asked, with a small smile.
"With love and pride," he assured her.
Ruthie threw her arms around him so hard she knocked him backward on the couch.
"I love you," Elliott ET Banks," she told him before kissing him, her lips and body grown warm from the fire, and from being near him.
"And I love you back, Ruthie, notorious RBG," Elliott whispered as he kissed her back.
"Merry Christmas, Jelly Bean," he added.
"Merry Christmas," she answered.