Aunt Peggy smiles when Sky strokes her ego with just enough sugar to make her a good houseguest. “Why don’t you try one, Sky? There is a fresh batch on the counter.”
That is an offer Sky cannot refuse, and it gives Charlie an opportunity to finish the conversation with her aunt.
Charlie is right. Aunt Peggy does make the best Christmas cookies in the world. Sky stands next to the counter taking small bites of the soft cut-out observing the environment with the kind of intensity that only a writer would. It seems like a simple thing. To stand in a house during a party and survey the surroundings. Sky rather enjoys the interactions of others. She also picks up on hidden tensions, strange looks, and the way Charlie’s family communicates.
A couple in their seventies is reclined on the soft tan couch near the brick fireplace. Sky can tell that they are entertaining themselves by monitoring the grandkids who are circling the living room with their arms stretched out like the wings of an airplane. Panicked phrases like “Don’t touch that!” and “Watch out!” carry across the house from attentive onlookers. Sky smiles at this before wiping frosting from her mouth.
Sheila’s husband Mike saunters up to the counter next to Sky. “May I have a cookie, or have you claimed them all by spitting on them?”
“Well, Mike, they are awfully good cookies, but you’ll have to take my word about the spitting part.”
Mike shoves a whole Santa clause pastry in his mouth, and mumbles, “I think you and me are going to get along just fine.” Sky watches tiny crumbs flake across Mike’s green shirt.
Sky says, “I think you missed out on some of that cookie” as she points at the mess.
“Someone should follow me around with a small vacuum cleaner. I am terribly careless with anything edible.”
Sky laughs with an unfamiliar ease and then strolls back over to Charlie.
Aunt Peggy leaves the table to pull the last batch of cookies from the oven, and Sky sits across from Charlie with a content smirk, “You were right about the cookies. I guess that I have to come back next year.”
Charlie’s eyelids lower at Sky with a look of confirmation. “Does this mean that I get to keep you for another year.”
“I was just considering that possibility, but now I have no choice. I’m addicted to Aunt Peggy’s baking.”
Sky and Charlie sit at that table for several minutes staring at each other before another family member approaches for introductions.
Charlie’s eyes shift to the left and she groans, “Oh crap, here comes Bryan. I apologize in advance for anything that he says.”
Bryan is a handsome boy in his late teens with a shock of black hair that leaves a small curl adhered to his forehead.
Sky thinks that he resembles super man, minus the blue tights. “Hi Sky, I’m Lenore’s cousin, Bryan.”
His stance is as cocky as the next phrase to come out of his mouth. “That’s funny, Sky, I thought dykes were supposed to wear black boots and chain wallets?”
Sky bites her tongue, but it is only in respect for Charlie. Getting into a fistfight with a teenager would not make a good first impression. Sky would usually respond to that with something like, “That’s what your girlfriend said before I fucked her!”
Instead Sky curls her upper lip and ignores him until he goes away.
At the end of the night Charlie and Sky bid their farewells to Charlie’s family and step back out into the real world. It had started to snow outside while holiday celebrations were going on inside. The separation of two realms-The realm of finely decorated interiors and the realm of icy reality. The cold air bites at their skin like the end of a bullwhip lashing out randomly from dark snow clouds. Charlie and Sky move toward the subway with a quickness fit for Olympic sprinters.