In a Holidaze

Behind her, Dad is carrying his bag and hers, and grinning ear to ear.

Andrew comes up behind me as Mom jogs up the steps, and she throws her arms around both of us. “I knew it!” she sings. “I knew, I knew, I knew!”

“How long have you known he was going to do this?” I ask her.

“Well, let’s see.” She looks to Andrew, calculating back, and Dad comes to give us each a hug. “Maybe two months?”

“We got the tickets in April . . .” Dad says. “So, longer than that.”

“I asked your permission in February,” Andrew says, laughing. “On our two-month anniversary.”

Lisa comes out, and she and my mom turn high-pitched and animated with their shared happiness. Ricky, Dad, and Aaron give each other a here we go look and head inside, presumably to find beer in Benny’s fancy new fridge. Benny greets my parents before heading down the steps with Kennedy, who’s holding a book about leaves. Theo wrestles with Zachary in the living room. I miss Kyle, and I miss my brother, but I bet there’s a tiny electric zap in their mood, even in the middle of their busy lives.

I catch a small tidbit of what Mom is saying: “. . . here, but before or after Christmas?” and assume that our wedding is being planned without us, that the pressure for grandchildren will start almost immediately, and that we’ll have our hands full with busybodies for the rest of our days. All of that will have to be discussed, but after the moment we exchange our vows—whenever that is—luckily, we won’t have to negotiate how to blend our families. They were blended long before we came along.

When we step out of the sun and back into the house, my eye is caught by a framed picture on the wall in the new sitting room. From far away it’s hard to tell what it is, but up close, I realize it’s an aerial photograph. Andrew puts his arm around me and then leans in, studying the photo. Finally, he reaches forward, putting the tip of his finger right in the middle. “There we are.”

“What?”

He moves his finger to the side, and I see what he’s showing me. It’s the cabin, in the center of a cluster of other buildings, in the midst of a busy swirl of streets, in an even busier stretch of mountains. Beyond that, the world stretches out in both directions, and every single point on Earth’s surface is the center of someone’s universe, but this picture gets it right.

The center of my world is right where I’m standing.