Jack asks Mona to move in the day the Ronco food dehydrator arrives in the mail. It makes sense - she sleeps over four or five nights a week, she's been dropping hints about her lease expiring for months, and her panties are overrunning his sock drawer. Then there's the disturbing discovery he made last fall when his brother left for college: Jack doesn't like being alone. Nights Mona doesn't stay, he can't sleep in the echo-ey house that had belonged to his parents, so he watches infomercials into obscene hours of the morning, showing up at the firm the next day with eggplant blotches under his eyes. The afternoon he opens the food dehydrator box, the first of five $19.95 installments already charged to his American Express card, Jack looks absently at the machine in his kitchen where nothing but coffee was made even before his mother dropped dead four years ago. No good is coming from solitude.
So the weekend before Christmas Jack rents a cargo van to move Mona's clothes and books and CDs; they leave behind the semi-disposable furniture from Value City she got when she started at The Plain Dealer after college. Loading boxes, Mona's tennis shoes slide on water frozen in the gutters. Her fat, red ponytail bouncing behind her, she's just so clean, like girls in douche commercials. And Jack feels good about her move-in until she suggests they get a Christmas tree while they have the van.
“I'm not really a tree kind of guy,” Jack says. “I'm more of a pretending-to-be-Jewish kind of guy.”
“Are you serious?”
“I'm an attorney, I live in Beachwood,” Jack smiles. “I've been getting Hanukkah cards from my neighbors for years.”
Amber eyes wide, Mona looks bewildered and adorable, much younger than twenty-four, and he feels obliged to say more even though he has already explained that major holidays for him usually involve exchanging unwrapped gifts with his brother over Chinese take-out.
“I'm not Scrooge,” Jack sighs. “It's just bad timing; we've got work and my brother's in town.”
“I know, I'm sorry.” Mona apologizes because she apologizes for everything - the horrible alarm clock gong mornings she has to wake up first, traffic jams on 71, paper cuts he gets at work. “But it hasn't snowed, and there's no tree, so it doesn't really feel like Christmas to me yet.”
Jack shakes his head; that drummer boy song is playing on the radio for the nine billionth time, and every store window in the greater Cleveland area has a frosting of spray can snow.
“We'll be at your parents house in a few days.” He puts his hand on the knee of her jeans. “Won't they have a tree?”
“My parents have a great tree.” Mona lays an always-cold hand on top of his. “But, I don't know, I thought it might be nice to have one of our own.”
Suddenly Jack has a weird of what might happen if he let the van drift into the crowded right lane of the highway. It's so clear he can hear the glass and metal bust up all around Mona.
Two days later, he's trying to push her off a balcony. His hands on her pale throat, her eyes wide and confused. Even as it happens, Jack is pretty sure it's a dream - he's not crazy about heights, the balcony looks suspiciously like the one from Rear Window, and he can't think of a reason he'd try to kill Mona. Still he jerks awake, heart knocking against his ribs. Her head is on his chest, arms draped across his stomach, throat seemingly unmarred.
Sliding out from under her, he goes downstairs to the living room and flips through channels - sitcom holiday episodes on Nick at Nite, softcore porn on Cinemax, Jaws, which he has seen half a dozen times because it's always on T.N.T. late night - until he gets to paid programming. He's watching a show about a sit-up machine shaped like a miniature fighter jet when Connor gets back from his high school girlfriend's.
“Jenny says 'hi,'” Connor says, black hair a mess, lipstick smudges on thin cheeks.
Jack nods and gestures to the television, where an enormous man, round muscles ready to pop through oiled skin, presses the fighter jet against his mid-section and does crunches. “Think that thing actually works?”
“Aren't you going to work at some ungodly hour?” Connor tosses Jack the car keys. Still in his red ski jacket, he moves an over-stuffed pillow, and sits next to Jack on the couch. “Shouldn't you go to bed?”
“I was asleep, I had a nightmare.”
“About what?”
Mona's confused eyes, his blue shirt cuffs on her neck. “I don't remember.” Jack looks for a place to put his keys, but he's in his underwear, no pockets anywhere.
On T.V. there's a series of impossible before-and-after photos and a phone number. Slouching into the couch, Connor puts his feet on the coffee table, folds hands across his abdomen, looks at Jack like he wants to say something, but doesn't.
A new program starts; Ron Popeil, in his butcher's apron with the Ronco monogram across the front, shows a rapt audience the dehydrator.
“That's what you and I are giving Mona's parents for Christmas.” He points to the screen.
Connor rolls his eyes, and guilt tickles Jack's guts. He can't remember a single conversation his brother had with Mona in the past year, both of them becoming awkward and quiet, almost sullen, when in the same room. Still Mona's parents had specifically invited Connor.
“If you don't want to go, you don't have to - if you'd rather go to Jenny's mom's or - ”
“I don't have anything else to do,” Connor yawns. “Besides, I've always wondered what real people did for holidays. It's like research for a Soc class or something.”
“Are you taking Sociology?”
“My roommate is.”
It occurs to Jack that he doesn't even know this roommate's name, what he looks like. Doesn't know his brother's major, doesn't know who Connor fucks or watches Indians games with.
On the TV, Ron gives the blonde co-host a piece of turkey jerky, and she discusses its virtues without irony - it's fresher and lower in fat than what you buy in stores. Having seen the program eight times, Jack knows Ron's lines by heart.
“So you're going to stay in Cleveland?” Connor asks.
“Where would I go?”
“I just kind of thought once I left for school you might go to D.C. or something. You used to talk about stuff like that.”
Jack does have vague memories of such talk, in the days before he took the associate position at the firm where his father had been managing partner, but now that seems part of another life, the one from the time before he ordered new living room furniture to replace the beige stuff his mother bought in the early eighties.
“You're going to stay with Jones Day?” Connor is asking.
“Yeah, I should make partner next year.”
“That's cool,” Connor nods, even though Jack knows he probably thinks that is the absolute antithesis of cool. “I guess you've got your reasons.”
Ron and Blonde make trail mix from dried fruit, and Jack wants to explain that staying in Cleveland has nothing to do with Mona, that it doesn't mean he's going to get married or buy a dog, that it's simply practical.
“If you drive me to work, you can have my car tomorrow,” Jack says instead. Connor nods and yawns.
Maybe Jack senses the change in his brother's breathing or catches a glimpse of Connor's head, arched at an odd angle against the top of the couch, but he doesn't expect any answer when he asks. “Do you think it's weird we never had a Christmas tree?”
The tree in Mona's parents house is huge. Even as he's pulling the car into the driveway, Jack sees it through the living room's full-length window, its star squashed against the ceiling. He visited her parents' place before and found it nice, if a bit quaint, with all the dark wood and heavy furniture. Now it's barely recognizable, every cubic foot of the wood and brick two story blinking with colored bulbs, a life-size manger scene in the front yard and plastic Santa in a plastic sleigh with plastic reindeer mounted on the roof. Parking the car, he looks at Mona and waits for her to apologize for the house like she apologizes for everything else.
“Wouldn't it be great if it snowed tonight?” She smiles, pats his knee, and bounces out of the car.
Reaching into the back, he shakes his brother awake.
“Welcome to Jesusland,” Jack says.
Mona's parents, like their house, have undergone a bizarre holiday transformation. Her father, a professor of Civil War history at O.U., is wearing a corduroy jacket with elbow patches, while Mrs. Lockridge, thick through the hips and thighs, is in one of those seasonal sweaters - this one depicts the twelve days of Christmas with gold thread and sequins. Instantly Jack is uncomfortable in a way he hasn't been since sophomore year at Penn when a girl he was dating dragged him to a “Take Back the Night” rally.
“Good to see you, Son.” Mona's father extends his hand, while her mother hugs Connor whom she's never met.
Three years younger, Mona's sister Frankie shivers in the doorway, wearing a skin-tight t-shirt and lots of purple lipstick. Red curls cropped at her jaw line, five silver studs dotting the curl of her right ear, body firm like only the bodies of twenty-one-year-old girls are firm - Frankie could be the ghost of Mona past.
“Thank God you guys are finally here,” she says, though she's looking exclusively at Connor, who's still wobbly with sleep like a newborn calf. “Mom's been driving us crazy getting stuff ready. Maybe now she'll chill.”
Mona's mother swats Frankie's shoulder in a sitcom way, and the six of them carry three overnight bags and boxes of presents (including the food dehydrator, which Mona wrapped the night before) into the house, where holiday music oozes from every room. Upstairs, Mrs. Lockridge assigns bedrooms with exaggerated gestures. Jack and Connor can sleep in Frankie's room; Frankie can bunk with Mona's older sister, Melanie; Mona gets her childhood bedroom, aggressively pink, with bookcases of worn stuffed bears and dolls in costumes from around the world.
Setting Mona's duffel bag on the lacy bedspread, Jack tugs Mona's hand, pulls her back in the room when everyone else has left, and somewhere in the house Eartha Kit is crooning that Santa Baby shouldn't keep her waiting.
“You told your parents you moved in with me, right?” he asks. “And they are okay with that?”
“Yes.” She laughs lightly. “You can sleep with me tonight. Mom just put you and Connor together for Frankie - it's one of those things my parents do. They pretend she's still a virgin.”
“She's not?” Jack smiles, raises eyebrows in mock astonishment. Frankie's jeans were tight and low enough on the hips to showcase two inches of pale, flat belly.
“No-oh.” Mona slips a hand between his dress shirt buttons; even through his undershirt, he can feel her freezing hands. “Frankie's like a total sexual predator.”
“You're sure your parents are cool with you moving in?”
Mona looks up at him, pupils blotting out the color from her eyes.
“Sure,” she says “My parents lived together before they were married.”
On her wrist sticking out of his shirt, Mona wears the tennis bracelet he gave her when they exchanged gifts last night. He got it at a Chagrin Falls jewelry store owned by the father of his first girlfriend. Anna, the ex-girlfriend who had married an area doctor, was working behind the counter, stomach swollen with her first child. When he said he needed a gift for his girlfriend, she'd raised eyebrows.
“A ring, perhaps?” Anna laughed deep and from the back of her throat.
“No,” he told Anna. “Anything but a ring.”
Jack hears himself saying something to Mona - maybe “okay,” or “I just wanted to make sure they knew.”
“Don't worry.” She grabs his ass. “If you're a good boy, you'll get some tonight.”
But her room is so oppressively girlie with its dust ruffle and throw pillows, the collection of Sweet Valley High paperbacks stacked above the desk. It's the last place in the world he wants to have sex.
“Sure,” he says, brushing her long hairs out of his face.
Long red hair in thick braids, Melanie - the ghost of Mona future - is reading from a very fat book at the kitchen table, seemingly oblivious to trays of iced wreath- and present-shaped cookies drying around her.
Jack has never met Mona's older sister before, but knows she's getting a Ph.D. in Russian literature at Johns Hopkins, that she's slept with more than one married professor and she made Mona feel stupid when they were kids, which Mona isn't over yet.
“You must be Jack and Jack's brother,” Melanie says, without getting up. In her cat-eyed black glasses, she comes from central casting to play a role: embittered intellectual in her late twenties.
“'Jack's brother' is what it says on his birth certificate.” Jack smiles, shoulders loosening; he's known girls like Melanie all his life - in A.P. Calculus classes, at Penn, at Jones Day - her he can handle.
“His name is Connor,” Frankie says, with more authority than the eight minutes she's known his brother should warrant. “My sister, Melanie.”
Melanie nods, and Frankie ladles eggnog from a giant copper pot on the stove into green plastic cups for her and Connor. She offers Jack a glass, but he shakes his head.
“So what is your drink then, son?” Mona's father has one hand on Jack's back, the other around a tumbler of amber alcohol the same color as his daughters' eyes. “Scotch? Brandy?”
The closest thing Jack has to “a drink” would be the gin and tonics he orders at business lunches if clients are drinking. “Coffee?” he asks, noticing the half-full pot in the machine next to bottles of red and white wine for the post-dinner party Mona warned about.
“Bailey's and coffee?” Mona's father asks hopefully.
When Jack agrees, her father actually winks at him. But in the Lockridge house, there's an incredibly skewed ratio of Bailey's to coffee - a strange upper-downer combination. It warms his lungs and chest, as he sits at the empty chair next to Melanie. Mona rests her butt against his knee, a display of affection Jack isn't sure about, not with Mona's father, round and red and Santa-like, hovering and topping off everyone's drink; not with Connor so close to the Total Sexual Predator. Mona's mother balances on tip-toes to grab an upside down shoe box lid from the top of the refrigerator.
“Everyone who spends Christmas Eve in our house has to hang an ornament on the tree,” she says, and Jack realizes the things on the box lid are little crafty projects fashioned from pipe cleaners, glitter, and molded plastic: things likely learned from the Home and Garden Channel. “Usually we insist everyone make their own ornament, but Mo thought you boys wouldn't want to. So with you all getting here so close to dinner anyway, the girls and I went ahead and made ornaments for you.”
Jack looks at Melanie with her Dostoevsky; he can't imagine she had much to do with the ornament making.
“We weren't sure what your major was,” Mrs. Lockridge says to Connor. “But Mo said you loved skiing, so Frankie and I came up with this.”
She hands Connor a pair of Popsicle stick skis with poles fashioned from mini-marshmallows and toothpicks, everything painted and shellacked. Holding the wire hook between his long thumb and forefinger, Connor thanks Mona's mother with so much sincerity he may actually mean it.
“The poles were my idea.” Frankie winks at Connor, and Jack is pretty sure the Jaws theme plays somewhere.
The ornament they've made for Jack is a palm-size, construction-paper Constitution - a document he hasn't had much use for since passing Con Law six years ago, certainly nothing he needs at the lawyer factory. A more fitting representation of his life would be a mini-carton of sesame beef from the 24-hour Chinese place across from his office.
“This is great,” Jack says. “I've never had my own ornament before.”
“The joys of being part of Chez Lockridge,” Melanie offers, but even she shuffles with the rest of them to the living room, where the massive tree narrows into the ceiling plaster.
There's a weird moment when Jack, Connor, and Mona are supposed to find spots on the tree, not already occupied by lights, figurines, popcorn and cereal chains, to hang their ornaments. Mona easily makes a place for hers - a pair of pink, ceramic ballet slippers - remnants of some long-extinguished dancer fantasy she has never mentioned. Connor, likewise, threads the wire over a green branch and silver foil slivers. With seven sets of eyes on his back, Jack tries twice to hook his Constitution, but it keeps falling onto the packages stacked at the tree's base. Finally, Mona puts her small, cold hand on top of his and helps.
“There you go,” Mona's father says. “You make a good team.”
Jack nods and worries about Mona's family, who have a better understanding of Connor, who likes to ski and doesn't have a major, than they do of him.
Four hours later, Mona is shuffling Jack from one cluster of wine-drinking guests to the next. Some are colleagues of her father others additional carrot-topped family, but they all have questions. It's as though he's on a never-ending job interview. So many “what kind of law?”s, and “where abouts are you from?”s, and a bunch of “you went to school where?”s. “Corporate, Cleveland, Penn,” has become his catch phrase.
Making things all the more challenging, he's lapsing into a turkey coma from the multi-course dinner and Mona's father keeps freshening Jack's mug of Bailey's and coffee. If that weren't enough to contend with, his brother, fresh glass of eggnog in hand, dances somewhere between fast and slow with Frankie to “It's a Wonderful World.” In April, Connor will turn nineteen, but with his dental-floss frame and too-long-in-the-front black hair, he could pass for fourteen - far too be young to be drunk at his brother's girlfriend's house on Christmas Eve, to be dancing so close with his brother's girlfriend's sister.
Easing away from Mona and the mini-circles of mingling professors and redheads, Jack puts a hand on Connor's shoulder, bony even through a thick cable-knit sweater. The song has stopped, but Frankie stands close enough to Connor that the dun dun dun dun of the Jaws music is blaring.
“Can I talk to you for a sec?” Jack asks, and leads his brother to the kitchen, where dozens of dirty dishes fill the sink, and there are enough empty wine bottles to start a three-lane bowling alley. During the two and a half years he'd been legally in charge of his brother, Jack hadn't made any rules other than common-sense understandings - don't block each other in the driveway; buy more coffee if you use the last of the beans; if doors are closed, knock before entering. But now he realizes there should have been all kinds of things Connor shouldn't have been allowed to do.
“Hey lamppost, whatcha knowin?” Connor asks. “I'm about to barf from all those cookies, you?”
“You'd feel better if you took it easy on the eggnog.” Jack takes the cup from Connor's hand and sets it on the counter. “And can you not fuck around with my girlfriend's sister in her parents' house, as like a Christmas present to me?”
Blood rushes to the hollows under Connor's cheekbones.
“I'm only here because of you,” he says, voice suddenly hard. “The only reason I even came home for break was because of you. And you know what would be a great Christmas present is if you could at least pretend to have the teeniest bit of faith in me.”
“It's not that - ” Jack says, but of course that is exactly what it is. “It's just, Mo says Frankie is a total sexual predator.”
Eyes blank, Connor stares at him. “She's a 110-pound girl,” he says, brushing Jack's hand off his shoulder. “I think I can handle her.” Taking his glass, he's through the swinging doors before Jack can say anything else.
The continuous job interview in the living room is such an unappealing prospect that Jack doesn't follow. Despite being sickeningly full, he opens the pantry and looks inside at boxes and cans - Chunky soup, Rice-a-Roni, dry pasta, an all-purpose cleaner he recognizes from one of the infomercials on overnight programming, cling wrap, foil, five different kinds of cereal - things he never had growing up. His mother had been anorexic before it was fashionable, and his father had made it home by dinnertime maybe once a week. There'd been lots of ten-dollar bills and notes taped to the freezer - Jack, showing a house at seven, pick something up for you and The Kid, XOXO, Mom - not many turkeys with homemade dressing; no mixed nuts and red and green M&M's in cut-glass candy dishes.
“Hey, you.” From behind, Mona laces arms around his hips. “Hungry?”
He shakes his head, turns to face her. “Your mother made me eat enough for three weeks.”
“You're being so good about this family stuff,” she says. “I'm sorry.”
“It's no big deal.”
“Sure it is.” They're alone with the dirty dishes and canned goods, but she still stands on tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “Certainly worth a blow job.”
“Re-ea-lly?”
She gives him a quick kiss, and he taps her nose with his finger. “That is not what you said you were going to do.”
Laughing, she reaches for the back of his neck. “Later,” she says, words muffled as her tongue flirts with his lips. Her mouth tastes like bubble gum. “My family really likes you.”
He chews the meat of her lower lip, harder and harder, until she pushes him away. Her hand flutters to her mouth, and she smears the small red drop. Jack and Mona stare at the thin stain on her fingertip; her eyes are the eyes from his dream. Finally she shakes her head.
“That is not the way to get me to do that other thing,” she says, but it seems forced.
In his mouth, he tastes her blood.
Because her parents passed out on the sunken couch, mother's head on the shoulder of father's corduroy jacket, father's head stacked on mother's, Mona sees out the last professors and redheads, Mona gets down on hands and knees to scrub a circle of red wine spilled on the cream carpet.
“Here try this,” Jack whispers, getting the bottle of cleaner from the kitchen cabinet. “I saw this infomercial where it worked miracles on grape Kool Aid.”
Kneeling beside Mona, he sprays the product on the carpet, takes her dishtowel, and begins to rub.
“No wonder my parents love you,” Mona says. “Frankie and Mel never bring home guys who wash our floors.”
Though he has no memory of ever cleaning anything, Jack scrubs the carpet as if the fate of the Western World depended on it, as if he's trying to prove something to someone. Finally Mona puts her hands over his - the nurse on “ER,” telling the handsome surgeon he has to give up, that the patient is lost, that he can stop shocking the body with those paddles. Jack hopes the food dehydrator does a better job living up to its “as seen on TV promise.”
“Come on.” Mona takes his hand. “Everyone's outside.”
She leads him past the tree in the living room, through the kitchen, to the deck with its patio furniture and gas grill covered with a fitted tarp.
Connor and Mona's sisters sit against the wood slats with their legs jutting out in front of them, passing a joint. The phone number of his own college dealer is probably still in Jack's address book, but he's furious at his brother. Not smoking up at his girlfriend's parents' house is another rule he should have made. He glares at Connor, but his brother's eyes are downcast and dull.
“Where have you guys been all night?” Frankie asks, from between Connor and Melanie, her elbow resting on Connor's thigh. Melanie hands Frankie the joint, and she takes a long drag, closing eyelids dusted with sparkly purple shadow.
“We've been around,” Mona says, an edge in her voice Jack is not sure he has heard before. “Someone had to put Mom and Dad to bed.”
Frankie hands the joint to Mona, who brings it halfway to her lips, then stops and looks at Jack for approval. Shrugging, Jack tells her to go ahead.
“You don't have to ask him,” Connor says, words lubed by alcohol - one of the first things he has said directly to Mona since Jack introduced the two of them last year. “Jack may have decided he's dad, but you don't have to ask his permission.”
“Conn - ”
“What?” Connor's eyes narrow to coffee beans. “You live in Dad's house, you work Dad's job, you periodically show up and tell me all the crap I'm doing wrong. But she shouldn't have to ask you what she can and can't do.”
“Don't - ” Jack says, but Mona speaks at the same time.
“Don't worry,” she says to Connor, “I know it's good to piss him off every once in a while. You know, keep the big guy in line.”
Connor nods, but Jack just looks at Mona. He thought she would apologize, but instead she turned Connor's anger in a way he wouldn't have thought her capable of. Conspiratorially, she bumps Jack's hip with hers, and passes him the joint.
Jack wants to get high at Mona's parents' house with his brother like he wants major dental work, but Connor is looking at him, and Frankie and Melanie's mouths curl in the same curious way. Even Mona's lips (lower one still puffy) purse into a question. For the first time in his twenty-nine years, Jack understands what health teachers meant during peer pressure lectures. Still this is a test, and from opening doors on first dates to the S.A.T., Jack always aces tests. It smolders his lungs, and he wrestles back a cough, but everyone's shoulders relax. Connor offers the truce of a shy smile.
“I like the Reed boys,” Frankie says. “You guys are okay.”
And maybe it is okay. Jack straddles a patio chair, Mona between his thighs, her back pressed against him. She shivers; it's thirty degrees and she's wearing a silk shirt. He rubs her arms, moves her hair off the back of her neck.
“I hate it when it's cold without snow,” she says. “It's like, I don't know, pizza without cheese.”
“Donuts without holes?” Connor's eyes and voice droop again.
“Sex without love?” Melanie looks up from tapping weed out of a film canister.
“Naw.” Frankie smiles a naughty, practiced smile. “See, Mel, that one can be okay.”
They pass the new joint until it's spent, while Jack contemplates sex without love. He thinks about Mona moving into his house, about whether or not he is becoming his father. God, pot is stronger than he remembers. His head weighs more than the turkey Mona's mother served, and his lips feel as though they're made of rubber.
“As we have no more pot, and Jack has no more brothers, I'm going to bed,” Melanie says, pushing herself to her feet. She's not really heavy, but she moves as though she has the extra thirty pounds her mother does. “Merry Christmas and all of that.”
Jack wonders if Mona will walk that way in a few years, wonders if her refusal to get tangled with academia will keep her gait light as Frankie's. Wonders if wondering means he'll be around to see it, wonders if he wants to be. After Melanie is through the glass doors, the rest of them become aware of the cold. Frankie suggests a game of pool, and they tiptoe inside so they won't wake the parents. Even the basement has been Christmasified, cardboard cutouts of reindeer and paper snow flakes the girls probably made in grade school are Scotch-taped to the wood paneling. Santa figurines crowd the tables.
“Reeds vs. Lockridges?” Mona suggests, as she orders the balls on the table and Frankie gets cues and chalk from the wall-mounted rack.
“Who knows.” Frankie winks an eye, and Jack has no idea who the intended receiver is. “We might all be Reeds one day.”
“You're going to scare away the Reed boys,” Mona says. “Ladies vs. gentleman?”
“Normally, I'd say you're on.” Connor rubs blue chalk on his stick. “But you're girls with a pool table in the basement.”
“You have a pool table in your house,” Mona says, and Jack notices she doesn't say “our house” or “the house” or any other phrase implying residence, even though she lives there now and technically could. He also notices that she and his brother seem awful chummy, or at least more comfortable around each other than they've been for the past year. He can't decide if that makes him happy or if he'd prefer to keep the parts of his life compartmentalized.
“Yes, but you girls actually have balls and cues.” It's hard to be charming when his head feels only loosely associated with his body.
They end up with the obvious team of Jack and Mona against Frankie and Connor. Jack was in high school when his father had his first heart attack and his parents refinished the basement with the pool and ping-pong tables, “recreational therapy,” the doctors had called it. Though his father never used them, Jack and his friends played lots of pool, and he's still pretty good, even stoned. By the time Connor was old enough to play though, the table was a storage area for boxes of unused things. He's decent with straight shots, but every time he tries to angle a ball off the rim, Jack is reminded of the C his brother got in high school geometry. For reasons Mona explains with only a smile, she's the best of them all, taking trick shots with the cue behind her back. And Frankie is awful, or maybe she pretends to be awful so Connor can guide her hands on the wood pole, position her slim hips against the table's varnished curves. They play three games, Jack and Mona winning all of them easily.
“You hungry, Conn?” Frankie asks, running her pale hands up and down her cue so gratuitously it's laughable. “Jack and Mo can play a winner's tournament, and you and I can check out the leftover cookie situation.”
Connor nods, follows Frankie upstairs. Watching them leave, Jack sits on the end of the pool table and realizes he isn't mad at his brother anymore - not for drinking too much, or getting high, or screwing around with the total sexual predator, not for almost starting a fight or for being disappointed in Jack for becoming their father. Jack does feel as though he might cry, which is strange because he can't remember the last time he cried - when his mother died? the end of Hoosiers? He tosses his cue from hand to hand, stares at the cheap carpeting.
“Jack?” Mona's voice is like cotton gauze. Sitting next to him, she runs fingertips through his dark hair. “What's wrong?”
Shaking his head, he touches his lips to her cheek, whispers, “I like your family.”
“But?”
“No, there's no 'but,' I really like them.” It's true. There's something charming about her mother's horrible sweater and the fact that her father is the fun kind of alcoholic. Even the ghosts of Mona Past and Mona Future are amusing - Melanie because she has given up trying and Frankie because she tries so fucking hard.
“Does my family make you miss your parents?” She asks.
“Maybe.” But he doesn't think that's it; there is a 'but,' but he's not sure what it is.
“I'm sorry,” she says. He turns his face to hers, and she kisses his forehead, both eyebrows. He closes his eyes, and she kisses the lids. “I wish I could have met them.”
When Jack thinks about his parents, he thinks about how he wanted his father there when he got his Bar results or how he would have liked his mother to yell at the doctors when he was hospitalized with bronchitis last year. Never once in the thirteen months he has been with Mona has Jack ever lamented her not knowing them. That is as close to the 'but,' as he can get, but he doesn't say anything because a launch sequence has been initiated. He's kissing her harder, as she fiddles with his belt; then he's got her on her back on the green felt table. Pulling off her gray pants, he licks her ankle, her calf, her knee, her thigh. He slides down her panties and licks the folds of skin - the only part of her body that's ever warm. She chews her lower lip, and a bead of blood swells at the spot where he bit her in the kitchen. As she comes, her arms fly up, knocking around all the stripes Connor and Frankie couldn't sink.
When they finish and Jack goes upstairs to Frankie's room, Connor is already sprawled across the bed, long legs and arms everywhere, Frankie nowhere in sight. In the dark, Jack puts on the cotton pajamas Mona gave him as part of his Christmas gift and moves his brother's hot body to one side.
“Hey.” Connor smacks Jack's hands. “Go sleep with your girlfriend. As sort of your Christmas present to me, let me have the whole bed.”
“I'd rather sleep with you. You don't try to warm your feet on my stomach.”
“Is that the way to get rid of you?” Connor rolls over and looks at the clock glowing two fifteen. “It's after midnight. Merry Christmas, Jack.”
“So you're Tiny Fucking Tim, now?”
“God bless us, everyone.”
An hour later, Jack wakes with the dead weight of Connor's arm across his throat. Pushing him away, Jack remembers the strangling-Mona dream. Connor moans, turns to his front, mumbles something about Beth, who may be someone at school or might be a dream creation. Jack doesn't get to know those things anymore.
He goes to the bathroom and finds Santa figurines even there, in a neat row across the toilet top. Instead of getting back into bed with his brother, Jack goes downstairs. Mona's parents are still sleeping, but they've shifted, solidified into each other. The CD changer shuffles back to Bing Crosby, who, like Mona, dreams of an unrealized white Christmas. Mammoth and bright the tree glows like trees in movies, the biggest box underneath it is the food dehydrator wrapped in red foil. A blue light sizzles and slowly looses its brightness. Jack worries a short might ignite the dry branches, bends over to unplug the tree, changes his mind and leaves it glowing.
In her bedroom, Mona sleeps on her back. Eyes closed, freckles across her nose, and all that red hair strewn across the pink pillowcase - a girl from a douche commercial. For a split second, he imagines smothering her with a pink throw pillow - how her body would shudder, arms fighting him. Instead he climbs into the bed, lays his head on her breasts.
“Jack?” she murmurs, touching his forehead with drowsy fingers.
“Shhh, go back to sleep.”
“Christmas kisses?” she asks, sleepy and childlike.
“Okay.” Inching up so they're at eye level, he kisses her lightly. Turning on her side, she pulls him closer, kisses more urgently.
“I love you,” she whispers in his ear.
“I love you, too,” he says, and means it, loves warming her hands, loves the way she sleeps on him. Still he has figured out the 'but' from earlier. “But I'm not a Christmas-tree kind of guy.”
“I know, you're a pretending-to-be-Jewish kind of guy.”
Her heated breath on his neck raises hairs on his neck. Maybe she does know that her family likes him for the wrong reasons; that she's only in his house to fill the emptiness; that in a parallel universe, he keeps trying to kill her. But he doubts it.
“I'm freezing,” she says, slides frigid hands under his pajama jacket, then looks at him, suddenly wide awake. “Did it snow?”
“No,” he says, without looking through the window.