“Are you my Secret Santa?” I ask hopefully. My name, along with the others attending today, was put in a hat and drawn two weeks ago. I ended up buying Byron a backpack for the next school year—Isabella’s suggestion. We had a forty-dollar cap on gifts.
“No. I got Keats. Just open it!” Heather says with a laugh.
Talk about pressure. Heather seems to have turned a corner with her outlook on life but I still worry that something I say or do might trigger a relapse of her depression. I push that thought away. I had to learn a long time ago that I can’t control how others feel and think.
I rip the paper and pull out a light pink apron with a white frill at the neck and along the waist. A tear stings the corner of my eye. Other than Isabella, who’s been doing it since I met her in Year 8, no one else has ever given me a Christmas present before.
“For today,” Heather explains. “Ready to learn another recipe?”
I nod as I put the apron over the jeans and ruffled top that nicely hide my bumps and lumps.
She touches my forearm and smiles up at me. “Here, let me help you with the tie.”
I put the apron’s halter neck over my head and turn around so that Heather can tie it at the back.
“Hey, Hay-gen, you’re here early.”
I look up to find Keats just beyond the kitchen doorway. He’s in boxer shorts and a singlet, his eyes still partly closed against the bright morning sunshine. A poignant ache floods my whole body at the sight of him.
I’m still in two minds about my feelings for him. We’ve been conspiring about this wedding for six months now, not to mention our driving lessons, regular phone calls and the texts in between. I was an idiot to think there’d be nothing more than lust, and I feel pretty stupid now clinging on to said feelings when he seems to have no intention of reciprocating them.
There are three weeks left till the wedding. And I suspect we’d probably part ways once he realises I never had any intention of helping him break up Isabella and Byron. I’ll have to figure out how to keep meeting up with Heather without accidentally running into him. It would be like we were sharing custody of his fabulous mother.
“Happy HTC!” I’m not sure I pull off that cheery greeting with my throat tightening at the thought of possibly losing two friends in a few weeks.
Keats stops trudging to the bathroom to open an eye a little wider at me, still pouty with sleepiness. “Happy HTC,” he mumbles with a slow sleepy smile before he resumes his somnolent trek to do whatever he does in the morning.
“I need another helper in here,” Heather calls after her son.
“Hm,” he groans without looking back.
“He and Byron used to wake up with the sun on the morning of HTC, and their father and I would wake up to the sound of squealing. Those boys loved the presents under the tree and in their Christmas stockings.”
I can’t imagine Keats as a little kid, but I remember him at twelve. Short for his age but with charm beyond his years.
***
Keats joins us just as I am measuring flour into a large mixing bowl.
“Morning,” he says, face now washed, teeth brushed, hair finger combed. He heads straight for the fridge, rifles through containers in there before raiding the produce drawer and coming up with a banana. “What do you need me to do, Mom?”
“I need the pumpkin peeled for the pie.”
Keats reaches around his mother to get a cutting board from under the sink and a knife from the block near the jars of sugar, flour and corn flour on the kitchen counter.
“Happy HTC,” he says, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I can make the whole thing today, if you like?”
She pinches his chin, leaving a smidge of flour there.
“You want to learn how to make this bread or the pie?” Heather asks me.
My body hums at the thought of being next to Keats for the next few hours. Hm, tough call.
“Um, maybe the pie.” I’m a weak, weak person.
“Make room, Keats,” Heather tells her son who scoots down the solid wooden table in the middle of the kitchen that serves as a food preparation surface.
“Give me a sec,” he says, quickly chewing his banana before going to the fridge and drinking directly out of an orange juice bottle with his name written on it in marker pen. “All right. Ready to see magic?” he asks me.
***
I haven’t been at a family Christmas dinner in over ten years.
I was always invited to Isabella’s house—my brother and I were—but I rarely took them up on the offer. It was a pride thing, which on hindsight was stupid of me. Christmas at the Harpers was always a happy feast. I shouldn’t have treated my brother to that only when our father was especially drunk and in a bad mood. Kris has never quite forgiven me for how I raised him. He still hates the “festive” season, and has not contacted me at all in months.
Isabella and Byron arrive first just after three in the afternoon with a couple of bottles of wine and presents for their Secret Santa recipients. Isabella’s eyes widen when she spots me in an apron chopping broccoli next to Keats but she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she and Byron start setting the table when they realise we have things under control in the kitchen.
Just before four, two more guests arrive. Mr Barker and his son Blake. Keats tenses up when the older man comes in and greets his mother with a peck on the lips.
“Smells delicious, Heather,” Mr Barker says and the way
