1.
IT WAS CHRISTMAS, AND DAN was in the middle of proposing to my mom when there was a knock at the door.
All five of us looked that way—me, Mom, Dan, my sisters Rose and Sidney, all of our heads swiveled en masse like something from one of those Golden Age musicals that Sid made us watch sometimes. Like we were a “five six seven eight” away from breaking into a tap number.
“Is this…?” Mom looked a little confused when I glanced back her way. Confused but happy—she still looked really happy.
“No.” Dan frowned from where he was standing in the middle of our apartment’s living room/dining room combo. My mom was in one of the chairs by the window, which we had pushed to the side to accommodate our little artificial tree. “Not … part of it.”
Mom let out a laugh, her hand flying up to her face. “Uh-oh.”
The knock sounded again, gentle but insistent.
“Should I—” Rose went to stand.
“Nina’s closer,” Sidney pointed out.
“Yes, Nina, please.” Mom grinned at Dan. He looked flustered but grinned back anyway.
I stood and went to the door.
Until this moment, nothing about the engagement had come as a surprise. The truth was, Dan had—albeit awkwardly—asked for “permission” from Rose, Sidney, and me a few days prior. It was oddly endearing, putting aside the notion of my mom somehow belonging to us and needing our approval to remarry.
Though Mom, too, had asked for our permission in a way, without formally asking for it, even before Dan had. She had taken us to Lincoln Square, the breakfast place near our apartment building, to celebrate the start of Christmas vacation and had cut her pancakes into increasingly small pieces, fiddled around with her napkin for a while, and eventually said, apropos of nothing:
“Dan and I are thinking.”
“Wow, I had no idea you guys had achieved telepathic communication,” Rose had replied, because Dan wasn’t out with us at the time, and also because, despite it being exactly the kind of thing that any one of us would say, as the oldest, Rose often got there first.
“Dan and I are thinking—” Mom repeated, really hitting the word to imply that the rest of the thought would be coming momentarily, “—about our future together. About all of our futures together. And we were thinking—we’ve been talking—about…” Historically, Mom would get more and more measured the more uncertain she was of how to approach something. By this point, each word was treated to its own sentence: “The. Idea. Of. Us. Getting. Married.”
Sidney looked up from her southwest scramble. “Married?”
“Yes.”
“Like, in a church?”
“Probably not.”
“Like, white dress, something borrowed, the Dantist is our stepdad now?”
“You know how I feel about that nickname.”
“There’s nothing mean about it,” Rose said. “It’s a portmanteau. His name is Dan, and he’s a dentist. If anything, it’s efficient.”
“Why does Dan have to be defined by his career?”
“Why does his career have to fit so seamlessly with his name?” was my contribution.
“Nina.”
“Mom.”
She sighed. Picked up her fork and speared one of the minuscule pancake pieces. Rose’s phone was on the table, and it vibrated once, and then again, in the silence. A freshman in college, Rose’s semester had ended a week earlier than mine and Sidney’s, and she had gotten a flurry of texts from high school friends over the last few days, people coming back into town for break. She looked like she wanted to reach for the phone, but she didn’t. Mom had a forks up, phones down policy. The fact that it was even on the table was a direct violation, but I think Mom must’ve been too distracted to really care. Now I knew why.
“How do we feel?” she said eventually.
“Sleepy,” Sidney replied.
Mom looked toward the ceiling. “How do we feel about Dan and me?”
“Oh, that,” Sidney said, and then grinned at me. At thirteen, she was the baby of the family. We let her get away with too much.
“We feel…” Rose paused. She could be measured like Mom sometimes. “Okay. Right?” She looked from me to Sidney. “We feel okay? About Mom and the”—Mom opened her mouth to speak—“Dan making it official?”
The Dantist, or Dr. Dan Hubler, DDS, was twelve years older than Mom. He always wore khakis. He made his own almond milk. He and my mom had met online just over a year ago.
It wasn’t the first time she’d dated since our parents split up—it had been almost ten years since they divorced. But it was the first time that it seemed like … something substantial, I guess. It was the first time that she seemed settled, and not in a bad way. Just in a way where she never acted any different around Dan than she did around us. She still seemed completely herself with him—still laughed as loud, still got just as exasperated sometimes.
Rose looked pointedly at me and Sidney when we didn’t answer, and Sidney bobbed her head and said, “Sure, I guess,” around a mouthful of eggs and bell peppers. I didn’t respond. Just divided a piece of pancake in half with my fork and then halved it again. I guess I came by it naturally.
Truthfully, I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt. I knew that Mom would be happy. I knew that I liked Dan well enough. But it had seemed abstract there in the booth at Lincoln Square, and even still when Dan had asked us afterward. Like something hypothetical.
But now here we were, in the middle of the afternoon on Christmas. Mom had found the box that “Santa” snuck under the tree after lunch, and it was right in the middle of happening—of becoming something entirely … thetical—when I swung open our front door to see who had unknowingly interrupted the start of this very real engagement.
It turned out to be Mrs. Russell, an older lady who lived a couple floors down. She used to babysit us after school when we were younger. Her grandson, Jamie, was in my class at school, and he lived with her and Mr. Russell.
She was holding a loaf of something wrapped in red cellophane with a silver bow stuck on top, and she smiled at me, eyes crinkling at the edges behind plastic lilac-colored frames.
“Hello, Nina! Merry Christmas!”
“Hi…” Saying Mrs. Russell out loud felt weird. We used to call her Gram like Jamie did when we were kids, Grammy when we were even younger. “Merry Christmas.”
“Our mom’s getting engaged!” Sidney called.
“Oh my!” Mrs. Russell said. “Congratulations!”
“Technically, it’s still in progress,” Sidney added.
“I’m sorry?”
Mom jumped up and joined us at the door just as Mr. Russell appeared next to Gram in the hallway, leaning on Jamie’s arm.
My heart rate ratcheted up a little.
“Eleanor, Paul, Jamie, hi. Merry Christmas!” Mom said, and Mrs. Russell’s eyes widened, clocking the box in Mom’s hand.
“We are so sorry to interrupt—” she began, but Mom shook her head, and behind her, Dan said:
“Please, join us. This is the kind of thing that’s even better among friends,” though I wasn’t sure if he had ever even met the Russells before.