Chapter 2 - To Derek's Girl
At 8:47 that morning, Diane started handing out presents like she was officiating something. She called the grandkids up one at a time. A cousin tore into a tablet and shrieked. The next kid opened the same box. The teenagers slid their fingers into card envelopes and came out with folded stacks of cash, and the room filled up with wrapping paper and noise and aunts saying *my goodness, look how big.*
Then Diane looked at Ellie, and her smile slipped for half a second before she caught it.
"Oh," she said. "Ellie."
She reached behind her armchair and came up with a flimsy drugstore bag, a crooked bow stuck to the handle.
"This is for you, sweetheart." She held it out at arm's length. "I didn't want you to feel completely left out."
Derek went rigid beside me before Ellie's hands even closed on the paper.
Ellie took it with both hands, because that's how she's been taught to take things from adults. She folded back the tissue slowly, careful, like there might be something breakable in there.
It was a vanilla candle. The four-dollar kind, with the sticker still on the bottom.
The candle wasn't what broke my heart. Ellie has never cared what a gift costs. She'd have been thrilled with a candle.
It was the tag. Diane had written it herself, in her tidy slanted cursive.
*To Derek's Girl.*
For a few seconds the whole room forgot how to make noise. My brother-in-law Kyle's fork stopped in midair. A cousin found something fascinating in the carpet. The retriever got up and moved away from the table like the air had changed. Next to me, Derek closed his hand around his coffee cup until the cardboard folded and coffee ran over his knuckles, and I don't think he felt it.
Diane kept smiling. That smile told me everything. She knew exactly what she'd done, and she was daring the room to be rude enough to say so.
I leaned toward Derek. "Derek."
He didn't look at his mother. He kept his eyes on Ellie. "I told her to give Mom the red box if this ever happened again."
"What red box?"
"The velvet one. Side pocket of Ellie's overnight bag."
I turned and stared at the side of his face. "You planned this?"
May you like
"No." His jaw barely moved. "I prepared for it."
He didn't pull it out then. He didn't stand up and make a speech over the torn wrapping paper. We sat through the rest of that day in a fog of fake, careful politeness while that little cardboard tag stayed lodged in my mind long after the trash bags were tied off.
