I love you,” Isabelle says.
“And I love you,” Kevin says. He holds Isabelle’s left hand and kisses her finger. He bought her the best ring in the store, from a girl he went to high school with named Phoebe Showalter.
Phoebe asked him who the ring was for and he said, “I can’t tell you that yet.”
Isabelle is trembling—whether because of the pregnancy or her delirious happiness, he can’t say.
He almost didn’t summon the courage to buy the ring. He kept thinking of Norah Vale, and how much he’d loved her, how much he had invested in her, and all the ways he’d changed the course of his life to please her. First, he left Ann Arbor, even though he’d been happy there. He liked the other students, liked his professors, enjoyed the school spirit at the football games; he’d also gotten the best grades of his life. But Norah was miserable. She didn’t look for a job, didn’t make friends, and didn’t like the friends that Kevin made.
Poughkeepsie and the CIA were better. A lot of his classmates were tattooed and pierced and did drugs or drank too much, and Norah felt more comfortable among them. It wasn’t so “rah-rah,” she said. She got a job waitressing, at the Palace Diner, but then, in Kevin’s final year, she got fired for cursing out a family of six who had only left her a ten-cent tip. She screamed profanities at them in the diner’s parking lot and was canned pretty much on the spot.
So it was back to Nantucket for the two of them, where Kelley lent Kevin and Norah enough money to put a down payment on a house. They limped along for a few more years, until Norah started hanging out with a guy named Jonas who drove a taxi and sold heroin, and Kevin had no self-respecting option but to ask her for a divorce. They sold the house; Norah took the money and left.
No more women, Kevin vowed.
He kept making excuses not to enter the jewelry store. He needed a coffee, and then he needed a sandwich from the pharmacy lunch counter. Town started filling with people, and he saw Gibby the inn’s summer landscaper first, then Cheesy, whom he’d gone to high school with, and he stopped to talk. Cheesy had his five-year-old with him, and the kid was jumping up and down, shouting about how Santa was coming and he had made a list, and he was going to leave milk and cookies, and carrots for the reindeer, and glitter in the yard so the reindeer could find his house, and Kevin thought, I am going to have a child; I had better get my ass into the jewelry store. Main Street was buzzing with happy, excited energy. The trees were lit up, and the shops had their doors wide-open for last-minute shoppers; most were serving cookies and cider. The Victorian carolers were strolling in their elaborate period costumes, like something right out of Mitzi’s display at home. As the carolers passed Kevin, he heard them singing “Good King Wenceslas.” Was it going to snow? It was still too warm, but maybe, maybe tomorrow…
Kevin lollygagged for so long that it became time for the red-ticket drawing, run by the Chamber of Commerce. If you bought anything from a Chamber member during the month of December, you received red tickets. Now that it was three o’clock, the tickets were being pulled by the town crier. There would be five one-thousand-dollar winners and one five-thousand-dollar winner.
Kevin found a strip of seven red tickets in his wallet. He thought about how great it would be if he won.
The five one-thousand-dollar winners were picked. Not his number, not even close. He nearly left because he knew Ava would be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wondering where he was.
But then, the big moment! The five-thousand-dollar winner was…!
I will pay my mother back, Kevin thought. Or I will put the money right into an account for the baby.
But the number called wasn’t Kevin’s. The winning red ticket belonged to Eric Metz, who was a mechanic at Don Allen Ford and the father of six kids, one of whom was severely autistic. The crowd roared! It was always best when a local person won, not to mention a person so deserving. Five thousand dollars would mean a lot to the Metz family, especially at Christmas. But when Eric Metz went up to turn in his winning ticket, he announced that he was donating the entire five thousand dollars to Nantucket Hospice, which had taken such excellent care of his mother when she was dying of lymphoma.
The crowd was silent for a second—perhaps acknowledging that they might not be so generous with a sudden windfall—then there was an even louder roar of applause, whistles, and calls of approval.
Kevin experienced an unfamiliar feeling. He knew he had just witnessed an act of grace, and all he could think was that he wanted to emulate Eric Metz going forward.
He had walked right into the jewelry store and told Phoebe Showalter he needed a diamond ring.
And now, he and Isabelle are suspended in a bubble of bliss. Please, he thinks, nobody pop it.
He makes a vow silently.
He will be a good husband and an even better father. He will buy a place for the three of them; he will marry Isabelle, and she will get a green card and, hopefully, become an American citizen.
Kevin lays Isabelle carefully down across his bed. He lifts the hem of her Mrs. Claus dress, and starts peppering her stomach with kisses.
She says, “Oh no, Kevin! Everyone is awake!”
“So?” he says.
“So I should be helping to clean.”
“Ava will clean up,” he says.
“They’re going to think you just proposed, and now we are back here…”
He takes one of her braids in his mouth.
“Kevin!” she says. “Stop! Your family just found out about us. I am sure they are still… so shocked.”
“Who cares?” he says.
“I care!” Isabelle says. “I am still a worker here. And, listen—it sounds like something is going on.”
Kevin tries not to lose his patience. He finally has Isabelle in his bedroom without it having to be a covert mission. She is his fiancée, and he would like to make proper love to her immediately. But he closes his eyes and listens. There does seem to be some kind of ruckus in the main room of the inn.
“Maybe the tree fell over,” Kevin says.
“Maybe is Mitzi!” Isabelle says. She hops to her feet, incited by this thought. Kevin knows she would like to give Mitzi a good, sound slap across the face. Mitzi brought Isabelle into the family and then left it herself. “I would like to go out and see.”
“Let’s not and say we did.”
“Kevin,” Isabelle says. “It is your family.”
“Our family,” he says, and he’s so tickled by this thought that he doesn’t even mind following Isabelle out into the hallway.
The main room is freezing because the front door is standing wide open. There is a loud, strange noise like that of a trapped or hurt animal, and Kevin sees his father embracing someone wearing a dark coat. Ava comes rushing out of the kitchen, followed by Scott in his Santa suit.
“Patrick?” Ava says.
Kevin is confused until he realizes that the figure his father is hugging and shushing is indeed the crown prince of the Quinn family. Patrick is crying, but to say he’s crying doesn’t begin to describe it. He’s sobbing, bellowing, howling. Kevin hasn’t seen this kind of emotion out of his brother since childhood—one scary afternoon at Nobadeer Beach when Patrick was ten and Kevin was nine and a wave took Patrick by surprise. It turned him upside down, inside out, and backward, and then there was another wave on top of that, and then another wave on top of that. Kevin had been too stunned and far too cowardly to make any move to help his brother, although he could see if someone didn’t come to the rescue, Patrick was going to drown.
Kelley had run down from where he and Margaret were sitting on the beach, and he pulled Patrick out. Patrick is crying now much as he had cried then—as if his life were in danger.
Ava says, “What… what is wrong?”
Isabelle squeezes Kevin’s arm and heads back to the kitchen. She is family now, but he can’t blame her for not wanting to jump right into this mess. Scott follows Isabelle into the kitchen, so then it’s just Kevin and Ava and Patrick and Kelley in the main room, plus a fifth presence, which is Patrick’s enormous sadness.
Kevin shuts the front door. He’s happy Patrick is here. He can’t wait to see the look on Patty’s face when he tells him he’s getting married and having a baby.
Ava is standing a few feet away from the melded figures of Patrick and Kelley, looking confused and bereft. She doesn’t like being left in the dark; she always has to know what’s going on.
“What is wrong?” she asks again.
Kevin decides the proper course of action is to pour shots of Jameson all around. They are, after all, a family of Irish heritage, their great-grandfather Quinn hailing from County Cork, so whiskey is acceptable in any emergency. Kevin brings the bottle and four shot glasses over to the sofa and coffee table in front of the hearth. The fireplace is laid out with birch logs as decoration for the party—it’s always too hot in the room to light it, plus Mitzi thinks fires lead to inhalation of secondhand smoke—but now Kevin opens the flue and stuffs a bunch of used paper napkins and some kindling under the logs. The room is cold, it’s Christmas Eve, they are a family in crisis, and, along with whiskey, they need a fire.
“Come,” Kevin says once he gets the fire started. “Sit.”
In general, Kevin doesn’t have much luck when he tries to tell his family what to do, but tonight his voice is strong and clear and authoritative. Ava sits, and Kelley leads Patrick over, at which point Patrick collapses on his back, hogging most of the room.
Kevin pours the shots and hands them around. Patrick already smells like a distillery and probably needs a shot of Jameson like he needs a hole in the head. He’s wearing rumpled suit pants and a white dress shirt with a weird yellow-purple stain on the front. It looks like a bruise. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. He’s not wearing socks, just fancy Italian suede loafers that probably cost as much as Kevin makes in a week.
Kevin raises his shot glass, and the rest of his family follows suit. Kelley takes a breath as if to say something—perhaps to impart some fatherly wisdom, which, Kevin realizes, they all desperately need. It has been so long since it’s been just the four of them alone doing anything. In Kevin’s memory, the four of them haven’t been alone together since Kelley moved out of the brownstone and into that weird executive apartment on Wall Street. That was during the year of transition: Margaret was gone, and Mitzi had not yet arrived. Patrick and Kevin and Ava used to take the 2/3 train down to see their father every other weekend, and they would always visit the South Street Seaport because the rest of the financial district was closed up. Once, Kelley took them to Windows on the World, at the top of the World Trade Center. Ten years later, on September 11, all Kevin could think about was that dinner. He and Patrick had stared out the window and wondered if anyone could jump and survive.
They, however, have survived. Sort of.
Kelley seems to realize that there isn’t anything wise or even appropriate he can say, and so the four of them merely touch glasses and throw the shots back, then set the glasses back on the table, all of this nearly in unison.
Ava wipes her lips. “I miss Mommy,” she says.
This starts Patrick crying again, and for a second Kevin feels like crying, too. For a second, the four of them are nothing more than refugees of something broken that they all wished could be whole again.