Free All Is Bright by Sarah Pekkanen Page A

a restaurant in Huntington Beach, a week after my thirtieth birthday, he asked if I wanted to get married. He wasn’t proposing, just revisiting a discussion we’d had before. I’d always told him I needed more time.
    “You’re never going to be ready, are you?” he’d said. “Will it ever be the right time, Elise?” I’d looked down at the napkin twisting in my hands, thinking about the chemistry lab we’d once taken together. We’d spent the whole semester putting two different elements together and waiting for reactions—a fantastic explosion, a fizzle, or something in between. Grif was funny, handsome, and smart, and yet I never saw sparks or felt a burst of heat with him—I was always stuck somewhere in between.
    Two weeks later, I left L.A. for San Francisco, hoping distance would help both of us heal. I’d sent Janice a note a month later, and she’d written me back, both of us being careful and polite. Too polite. I hadn’t known how she really felt until now.
    “You know, we’re on our own this year, too,” Janice was saying. “Jake came home for Thanksgiving”—Jake was their older son, who’d gotten married to his boyfriend a few years earlier—“but they flew out to be with Dave’s parents for Hanukkah. They rotate their visits every other year. And Griffin went to Minnesota to meet Ilsa’s family. It’s funny how empty the house seems. We’ve gotten used to it, for the most part, but during the holidays . . .”
    Grif went to meet Ilsa’s family? For Christmas?
    I felt a pang in the middle of my rib cage. Grif and I spoke or e-mailed every month or so—we were still trying to navigate our way back to the friendship that predated our romance—but I hadn’t realized his new relationship was so serious.
    “I brought something for you and Stephen,” I said when I realized the silence had stretched out a beat too long. “I was going to drop it off tomorrow on my way to see Nana.”
    She hesitated, then smiled. “Why don’t you come over tonight for dinner?”
    “Are you sure?” My voice was so eager it embarrassed me. Janice’s house was never unwelcoming, but oh, at Christmastime . . . She made homemade gingerbread whoopie pies, layered with whipped cream and caramel, and spiced cider bubbled on the stove. The hearth was lined with stockings for two cats and a shaggy old dog along with the rest of the family. And every year since I’d turned seven or eight and began spending almost as much time at Griffin’s house as my own, there was a gift labeled with my name under the tree. Neighbors popped by with jugs of eggnog or plates of iced sugar cookies, and everyone gathered around the upright piano as Stephen played and he and Janice sang carols—a tradition that had deeply humiliated Grif as a teen. When he entered his twenties, he joined in the singing, and so did I.
    It was the way I imagined—dreamed—my house might have been, if my mom hadn’t succumbed to leukemia when I was six. Don’t get me wrong; my father is a very good man. He came to all of my track meets, cooked simple dinners, helped me with my English essays. But he seemed so much more comfortable reading the sports page than talking; sometimes I felt sorry for him as he stuttered through explanations of menstrual cycles and the importance of birth control. Dad had never remarried, but for the past decade he’d had a live-in girlfriend named Clarissa. When he’d retired a few months ago, they’d taken off for their long-planned around-the-world trip.
    “We could cancel the trip and come see you instead,” he’d offered after Griffin broke up with me. “I know this is, ah, a . . . tough time for you. If you think the holidays might be too hard . . .”
    I knew how much he’d been looking forward to the trip. His deposits were probably nonrefundable, too. Making that offer was perhaps the single kindest thing he’d ever done for me.
    “Absolutely not,” I’d insisted. “I’m so busy with work