Free Not the Best Day by Brynn Stein

I T WAS two days before Christmas, and against my better judgment, I was in downtown Bakersville. My sister, Erin, was having a party for her friends and insisted that my attendance was not optional. I had told her I’d see her both of the next two days. Our parents had been separated for almost a decade, and we’d fallen into the tradition of spending Christmas Eve at Dad’s and Christmas at Mom’s. All five siblings and our various families tried to make it to both, so I wasn’t sure why I had to go to yet another party. I was not a party person. But still, I guessed it was nice that Erin considered me a friend and not just a brother.
    Jake, Mark, and Chrissy weren’t invited to this party. It had always been like we five were two separate families, even though we were full biological siblings. The older three were all within five years of each other. Then came Erin ten years later and me a year after that. So it’s always been Erin and me… and then everyone else. Then again, the fact that I was invited and they weren’t might just be because Erin and I were the only two who remained single and didn’t have kids, and Erin didn’t want to deal with kids at a friends-only party. She didn’t really want to deal with kids at all. She vowed that she would never have any and always said that was one good thing about me being gay. I wouldn’t have kids. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that if I ever found “the one” and settled down, I’d love to adopt. But that was so far down the road, if it was even on the map, that I didn’t have to worry about it right then. Besides, I think she secretly knew.
    But whatever the reason for the invitation, and whatever my feeling about having to go to yet another party, I was downtown, in the snow, getting last-minute gifts. I had no one to blame but myself, but that didn’t make me any less surly. I’d known I needed a generic gift for Erin’s party for months now, and of course I always needed presents for all three million family members. But every year I waited until the last minute to even start shopping, because as much as I hated crowded get-togethers, I hated shopping even more.
    I pulled into the parking garage, fully expecting to be relegated to the very top. I got lucky, however, and caught someone backing out on level three. So before long I exited the elevator on the ground level and walked out onto the sidewalk—and was immediately accosted by Mother Nature. I pulled up my collar against the wind as frozen crystals cut into my face with gale force. That was probably an exaggeration, but it felt that way, so I ducked into the first shelter I could find. And wouldn’t you just know it had to be a toy store. God knew I needed a shit ton of toys, though, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise. At least it wasn’t one of those mall-sized places you could get lost in for three days. It wasn’t tiny, but it wasn’t huge. It might be just the size for my purposes.
    One of the things I treasured most about Christmas was that it brought out all the love in the world. Three women were fighting over who was going to get the last ugly doll that no doubt was this year’s “must have” item for girls, while across the aisle in the boy’s section, two men, each holding one end of a toy gun, were pulling back and forth, cussing up a storm. The whole store was like something out of that old Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas movie from the nineties that my mother liked to watch yearly for some unexplained reason. I was waiting for the group of fraudulent Santa Clauses to come in and join the fray. As silly as that would have been, what was actually happening wasn’t much better.
    I made my way around the establishment looking at this and that and quickly regretted foregoing the buggy when I first came in. I picked out a couple of boxes of Lego kits—always popular with my nephews—a xylophone for my baby niece, and a baseball set for Sarah. No, it wasn’t a