Elena spent Christmas morning calling her parents from the pay phone outside the laundry because her apartment line was temperamental and charged her emotional interest. Snow sifted into her collar. She told them she was fine. She told them about the rink without telling them about Jake, then told them about Jake without making him sound like a decision already made. Her mother said, "A man who only skates backward? Mija, that is either poetry or a warning. Taste his cooking before you decide which." Her father said, "Does he eat? Bring him if he eats. Men who don't eat are hiding something, usually opinions about football." Elena laughed into the receiver and watched snowplows crawl past like patient animals doing sacred work.
In the afternoon she walked back to Jake's block with a tin of cookies she had baked in a panic of generosity, butter and sugar and the last of her chocolate chips. Claire answered the door, took one look at Elena's red coat over jeans and the gold clip still in her chestnut curls—arched brows, winged black liner softened for daytime, rosy blush, glossy deep-pink lips because some standards did not take holidays off—and pulled her inside like family had been waiting with a spare chair.
Mikey yelled, "ELENA," with the volume of a stadium that had learned manners from cartoons.
Jake appeared from the kitchen in a sweater instead of satin and looked almost shy, which Elena found unfairly attractive and also endearing in a man who could stop on a dime going the wrong way.
"You came," he said.
"You burned pancakes?"
"I burned the first batch. The second batch is merely threatened. The third batch has entered witness protection as toast."
Dinner was loud in the best way. Phil told airplane stories that involved a crying baby and a man who tried to assemble a model car in his seat tray. Mikey demonstrated his snowflake until glitter fell into the mashed potatoes and Claire declared it "seasonal seasoning." Elena's cookies disappeared with a speed that flattered and alarmed her. Jake's ankle ached from yesterday and he did not hide it; Elena noticed and passed him the couch pillow without commentary, a small choreography of care that Claire watched with the sharp kindness of older sisters.