“I can’t believe this is your life,” Jesse suddenly says.
“What? What do you mean?”
“It’s all just so…”
“Over the top?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “But… yeah. In the best way though. It’s so… different than how I grew up.”
Which gets me curious. Jesse hasn’t talked about his childhood much. Not since that first night we reconnected and ate ice cream at the Tastee-Freez after the bachelor auction. “How did you spend Christmas Eve eve?”
He inhales deeply and holds his breath for a moment, then lets it out slowly. “We didn’t.”
“Oh. Well, that’s understandable. Most families don’t have a tradition like this.”
“I mean, we didn’t celebrate Christmas at all after I was like… ten, I guess.”
I frown. I do remember him saying something like that before. “But when you took me down to the family floor in the Bossy, you pointed out where the tree was.”
“In front of the windows.”
“Yeah. So you must have some good memories from that time, right?”
He sighs, looking out at all the people in the street for a moment. Then he looks at me. “No, Emma. I don’t. I mean, there were a few years when we got presents and had a tree. The only real tradition that I even remember from that time is the stockings we had over the fireplace. And that’s only because Johnny wrote our names on them in red glitter glue. But most years? It was just another day.”
Now I frown. “Oh. I don’t think I realized that.”
“But…” He smiles at me and takes my hand. His is cold from holding the shaved ice cup. “There were a few years when Johnny tried. Once he chopped down a little evergreen shrub out in the Bossy courtyard and hauled it upstairs.”
“What?”
“I swear to God. He chopped down what was basically a bush, hauled it upstairs, and then we went on this massive hunt for Christmas shit so we could decorate it.”
“How old were you?”
“Mmm… maybe six?”
“So he was eight?”
“Yeah. Eight.”
“Did you find the Christmas boxes?”
“No. And I was pretty sad about that because I looked really hard for those glitter-glue stockings. But we did find Easter stuff. And we decorated the tree with pink and green Easter grass and filled up the baskets with forgotten junk-treasure we found while we were searching for the Christmas shit, and those were our presents that year.”
And even though this is kinda sad, it’s also kinda cool too. These three brothers found a way to celebrate. “Was it fun?”
“I guess. Sure. I guess it was, even though it wasn’t really a Christmas.”
“What was in your Christmas basket?”
“Oh, man. This kinda was fun. Johnny and Joey were good junk-treasure hunters. I got an old World War II medal, a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo, and a whole bunch of metal toy soldiers that I’m pretty sure were part of some very expensive custom chess set.”
“What did you give them? Do you remember?”
“I remember.” He’s smiling big now. “I found this little dog statue for Johnny. He always did want a dog, even when we were kids. It was kinda ugly. And it was actually probably an ashtray.”
I laugh.
“But he loved it. I wonder where that thing went?” He ponders this for a moment. “I dunno. But he had it around for a long time. Maybe it’s still up there? Up in his apartment?”
“You should go look.”
“I don’t think that place is ours anymore. And besides, Johnny probably wouldn’t like me nosing around in his shit.”
“And what did you get Joey?”
“Joey… I found Joey this cool sword. It was a real one too.”
“What kind of sword?”
“You know, like one of those martial arts swords. A katana or something. He always wanted to be a ninja growing up.” Jesse snaps his fingers. “You know what holiday we did do, though?”
“Which?”
“Halloween. Joey was always a ninja. Every freaking year. We would dress up and go trick-or-treating inside the building.”
“What?”
“Yeah.” He laughs. “Thinking about it now, I’m kinda embarrassed. Like… what were all those people thinking about us? Not all the floors were ours, ya know? They’re actual companies. Big-time companies. And here come the Boston brothers begging for candy. They must’ve wondered, Who the fuck is taking care of these kids? Don’t they have parents?”
“But they couldn’t say anything, could they?”
“Nah. We owned the building. And my father was a scary dude. They gave us lots of shit. Filled up our pillow cases with candy. Or if they didn’t have candy—because no trick-or-treaters were supposed to be showing up at the end of a freaking workday, right?”
“Right.”
“So sometimes we got office supplies instead. We had a lot of staplers at our house.”
I lean into him, feeling simultaneously happy and sad at his childhood memories. “Still,” I say, after a few moment of quiet introspection. “It’s special in its own way, don’t you think?”
“My childhood? Yeah. Definitely not typical.”