"Bars want you to forget. I didn't want to forget. I wanted to remember being sixteen and believing the mirror ball was a kind of church. Also I look better in skates than on a barstool. Honesty is part of my brand tonight."
"Your brand is strong," Jake said. "Fur, velvet, red wheels, and a warning shout. Very cohesive."
"Coming through is customer service," she said. "I'm helping people not get hit."
Mikey crashed gently into Jake's legs then, not hurt, only dramatic, and demanded they watch him do a "backward almost like Uncle Jake." He managed three wobbling reverse steps and then sat down hard, laughing. Elena clapped. Jake bowed as if presenting an heir to a strange throne. In that moment Elena felt the shape of a possible life flash through her—not a plan, not a trap, just a picture: snow, a child, a man who told the truth about pain, a town that was ordinary enough to be real. She put the picture away without crumpling it. Pictures could wait. Christmas Eve was for not scaring the soft things.
They spent twenty-five minutes at the craft table near the party room, where Dot had set out paper snowflakes, glue sticks that had seen better decades, and glitter that would live in Mansfield's carpet until the next century and possibly the one after that. Elena helped Mikey cut a lopsided star and glue tinsel to it until the thing looked like a weather event with opinions. Jake held the glue bottle like a man defusing a bomb and somehow still got glue on his thumb. Glitter got on Elena's faux fur. Glitter got on Jake's satin. Mikey got glitter in his hair and looked triumphant, as if he had won a war against blandness.
"You're good with him," Jake said quietly while Mikey argued with another child about whether snowflakes could be orange or whether orange was "against the rules of winter."
"I have cousins," Elena said. "And I remember being eight and needing someone to take the glitter seriously. Adults forget that seriousness and silliness can be the same thing if you're small."
"Claire's going to ask me who you are."