Originally from 2019

The fireplace was crackling in the living room and the thermostat was turned up to 78 degrees to combat the freezing temperatures outside. It was so cold, snow couldn’t even fall, so I found myself staring out the kitchen window at naked trees and dead grass. Another year without the longed-for “white Christmas.” I didn’t even want to come home to begin with because it meant I’d have to see my superficial mother and my asshole of a dad. Going to college was like a vacation from them. Ezra, my best friend back at school, said I could’ve gone home with him to stay with his family in East Ohau. That’s in fucking Hawai’i–do you realize how cool that would’ve been? But no, my mom insisted, “Christmas dinner won’t be the same without you home!” 

My sister, Maja, brought her ugly-ass, gap-toothed, greasy-haired, “I went to Thailand to find myself”-looking-ass boyfriend with her, and guess who I sat right across from when we ate dinner? His name was Tofu and he was a vegan. Yes, his name was Tofu. His name legally was Christopher, but somewhere along the way, he decided to go by “Topher” instead of “Chris” like a normal fucking person, and I guess it sounded close enough to Tofu for him to claim that as his title. It was fitting. His name was weird, and so was he. A giant ham stood directly in the middle of the table, and he kept eyeing it, like his inner carnivore was trying to escape. Maja was on his right, and the two of us kept exchanging looks. You know, when you talk with your eyes? I telepathically convinced her to cut the ham, just to see what her boyfriend would do. She reached for the knife and the two pronged fork–whatever it’s called–and he grabbed her wrist like a ninja and said, 

“Don’t you want your dad to cut that thing? You don’t wanna eat meat, right?”

I gave her a look, but she wasn’t looking back at me. She just put her hand back down and looked at our dad. 

“What a gentleman!” my dad laughed. Right, because grabbing your girlfriend’s wrist and not allowing her to do what she was planning on doing is so gentlemanly. 

No one said anything after that. We all sat there, chewing in dead silence. It was killing me. “So…does anyone wanna talk?”

“Why not?” my mom smiled, fake as ever. “Mia, how’s your first year at school?” 

“It’s fine,” I replied. I don’t know what I expected, the woman’s so shallow. 

“And how’s your new business been?” she asked Maja. 

“It’s doing great!” her boyfriend answered before she could say anything. “So much business this time of year, we can barely keep up!” 

I rolled my eyes and looked at Maja. She looked back, telling me with her eyes that she was used to him speaking for her. 

I was on my third slice of ham and the only topics broached were how I was doing in school, that damn flower shop that Maja and Tofu had just opened next to the train station, and how fucking good the ham was (much to Tofu’s dismay). “Mom, how’s the job searching?” I asked. She had been a stay-at-home mom for far too long, basically up until the summer of that year when there were officially no more kids to stay at home for. I’d gone off to college and Maja got an apartment with Tofu in the next town over. Apparently something “compelled” her to get a job around July-August, but I never bothered to ask where that compelling feeling came from. 

Tofu stopped in the middle of raising his fork full of green beans to his mouth to say, “She doesn’t need a job, now does she? Not when her husband’s a surgeon. He can work hard t–”

“Would you stop kissing my dad’s ass for one second, Tofu?” I interrupted him. 

My dad folded his arms, frowning at me while still chewing his mouthfull of ham. “Here you go again, being a bitch for no reason.” My chest tightened at the sound of that word coming out of his mouth. I rolled my eyes, pretending not to care.

“Mike, don’t call her that!” my mother shouted back at him. “That word is used to put down women and you should not be using it to degrade my daughter!”

“Your daughter? Last time I checked, she was my daughter, too, Pam.” I could see a vein emerging from his temple. 

I looked across the table at Maja again, but she wasn’t looking back. Just staring down into her lap. Tofu, on the other hand, was entranced in the blossoming shouting fest between my parents like it was a sitcom, his chin resting so comfortably in his hand. I felt a boiling sensation in my chest that compelled me to sock him in the face, but I withheld. “I don’t care whose daughter I am. I asked how the job search was going. Now will you let Mom answer?” 

“You don’t care whose daughter you are?” My mother pouted her lips at me. “Sweetie, you could be the daughter of drug addicts! Or the daughter of Kris Jenner! Or you could be an orphan. An orphan!”

If I were the daughter of Kris Jenner, at least I’d be famous. “Okay, mom.” I picked up the piece of golden cornbread from the corner of my plate and went back to eating. 

“Mia, what has gotten into you? You go off to college for a semester and come back with no respect for your parents.” My dad slammed his fork down as if he was offended by my chewing.

I rolled my eyes and took another bite of the cornbread. Tofu was still mesmerized by the whole exchange, slowly forking mashed potatoes into his mouth. I tried to look at Maja to exchange some looks with her again, but the second we made eye contact, she hastily stood up from her chair, the feet of it scratching against the tile floor as she muttered, “I need to use the bathroom.” 

I sighed. I could only last so long trying to ignore the stare my dad was giving me from the corner of my eye. “Sure,” I finally answered him, giving him a quick glare to acknowledge that his eyes might as well have been shooting lasers into my head. “I’m going to ask this one more time. Mom, how is the job search?” At this point, I barely cared anymore, but I was set on having my question answered.

My mom looked at me, my dad, then back at me before hesitantly saying, “Oh, it’s not great.”

Tofu decided it was a great time to butt in. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Davis. But at least you can sleep knowing that Mr. Davis has a great job hims–”

“You are so irritating!” I shouted at him, nearly choking on my last bite of cornbread. “No one was talking to you, Tofu. You don’t know shit about our family’s financial situation! Now stop kissing ass!” 

“Mia!” my dad yelled, standing up and as a result, shaking the whole table. The wine in my mom’s glass wobbled around, just barely missing the rim. “Our financial situation is just fine!”

I never said it wasn’t.

“Don’t be so ungrateful!”

Where did you get that from?

“The money I made put all of those gifts under that tree!” He pointed over the kitchen counter and into the living room at the Christmas tree that was shedding all over the fucking carpet. There were about five or six gifts under the tree, all wrapped in shimmery red wrapping paper, the light from the nearby fireplace making them glisten.

I don’t care. 

When the only response he got out of me was a blank stare, he took it upon himself to stomp his way to the tree, pick up a gift from under it, and point to the name tag on it as if I could read it from twelve feet away. “Do you care, Mia? Do you care that my hard earned money went into this gift for you?”

Oh my god, what are you on about? “To be honest, not really. The world’s not all about things and money, dad.” I was more appreciative of my mom’s cooking, quite Mikely. 

His jaw dropped as he let out a singular, breathy laugh. “You don’t care?”

I shook my head. 

“Mike, let’s calm down,” my mom said, just quiet enough so that my dad could pretend he didn’t hear her. Tofu seemed to be enjoying it though, finishing up his mashed potatoes as his eyes glimmered. I wondered why Maja had been gone so long, but I’m glad she was. She wouldn’t have liked this. 

“So you wouldn’t care if this gift disappeared right now?” he asked me, I guess expecting to get some pleading answer out of me like, “Oh, no dad! I appreciate everything you do for me and I shall worship the ground you walk on until you die.” 

I shook my head again. It probably was a pair of socks or mittens or something that wasn’t even thoughtful at all. It’s not like he’d made a huge effort to learn anything about me. Sure he’d been home quite a bit in the summer, helping me shop for sheets and stuff for my dorm, but before then, he was typically working some wild amount of hours at the hospital a town over. It didn’t bother me, though.

His eyes widened below his furrowed brow, making him look borderline insane before he told me to, “Say goodbye to your gift, then, Mia!” Without breaking eye contact, he tossed my gift into the fireplace like a frisbee, and the fire began to crackle even louder in response. He stopped looking at me and stared into the fire, and I couldn’t tell if he was regretful or proud of his attempt to teach me a lesson. 

My mother broke the silence by shouting, “Mike! What is wrong with you?” She squinted her eyes and her cheeks reddened, and I knew it was time for her ugly crying.

Tofu looked at me with his mouth wide open in a smile that read, “You really let him do that!” as if it was funny to him. I still wanted to punch him.

I thought it was stupid. Did it matter that I didn’t get some worthless present for my 18th Christmas? No. Did it matter that my dad was behaving like a child? Not really, though I wondered what exactly was going through his mind as he turned and walked up the stairs without saying anything. 

Once the sound of his footsteps disappeared up to the second story, my mom, Tofu, and I sat there not knowing what to say. I didn’t want to say anything, anyway. I was just cursing to myself about how none of this bullshit would’ve happened if I had just gone with Ezra to East Ohau. But no, I just had to be here, listening to my mom sob while I sat across the table from my sister’s ugly-ass, gap-toothed, greasy-haired, “I went to Thailand to find myself”-looking-ass boyfriend whose name was fucking “Tofu.”

I heard the bathroom door down the hall creak open slowly, and Maja walked back to the table. “Where the fuck have you been?” I asked her. At that point, I’d assumed she’d left to avoid witnessing the outburst that had just erupted, but it’s not like she could’ve predicted it. Tofu put his hand on her back and said something in her ear. 

She glared at me. “I was in the bathroom, Mia.”

I had a mini three second debate in my head about whether or not I wanted to keep interrogating her, and I decided to go ahead. “That was perfect timing, wasn’t it?”

“Perfect timing for what?”

“Don’t act stupid, Maja.” 

Tofu kept rubbing her back as if she needed comforting. The escapologist didn’t need comforting. If anything, I did. My stomach was doing backflips in disgust. 

She rolled her eyes. “Do you know why dad was so angry?” She slammed her hand on the table, shaking up the plate in front of her. 

“Because I didn’t praise him like he wanted?” I mocked. It was stupid.

My mom stopped sobbing to say, “Maja, I…I think she already knows…”

Do I know what? I shook my head slowly. Did somebody die? 

Maja folded her arms. “She doesn’t know, Mom.”

My mom looked at me, her eyes still full of tears. “Your father lost his medical license,” she told me.

“Mmhmm,” Maja hummed, “Back in July. That’s why Mom’s looking for a job now.”

At first I didn’t care, but then once I realized that my parents basically had no income, I felt pretty bad. I looked up at Tofu, who I guess was the only other person who was just hearing this for the first time, and he’d lost all the color in his face as if it was going to affect him. I’m sure his Whole Foods shopping Kombucha drinking parents were doing just fine and ready to fund him if he needed it. 

“That sucks,” I replied. I felt like I was supposed to say more, but it’s not like anything I could’ve said was going to change the situation. I’m not God. “Why didn’t anyone tell me this until now?”

“You never asked,” Maja answered. “Maybe if you talked to Dad you’d know something about him.”

“Maybe if he were home for more than just 8 hours to sleep in between shifts I would’ve,” I retorted. I didn’t get why she was being such a bitch. At least she was finally talking and Tofu wasn’t. “How did he lose his license…exactly?” You don’t just lose that thing over something small.

“It was a medication thing,” my mom muttered. “They said he was prescribing patients medicine they didn’t need.”

I scoffed. “I mean, yeah, that’s a valid reason.”

“Well…he was prescribing them just in case, I guess. He was afraid of not giving it to them and it turns out they desperately need it,” my mom tried to explain.

That’s fucking stupid. “What do you mean, ‘just in case?’ He’s a doctor, he should know.”

My mother sniffled and wiped her nose. “None of that matters right now, okay?” She sounded desperate. “Can we just finish our dinner before it gets cold?”

I looked down at my plate of mashed potatoes, gravy, and half a slice of ham and somehow it felt so uninviting. I just kept thinking about the fireplace and how it ate up whatever gift my dad managed to get me, the loud crackling as the fire chewed it up replaying in the back of my head. “Mom, do you know what Dad got me?” I didn’t want it to seem like I cared, but I couldn’t help but be curious.

“It…a pair of socks. It was a pair of socks, Mia.” She sniffled again. “I think he rolled up some money inside, though.”

I felt my heart drop. “How much money?”

“It doesn’t matter how much. Will you please finish your dinner?” I could tell my mom was impatient with me.

“Yes, let’s finish dinner,” Maja smiled at my mom, reaching for the pan of ham. 

Tofu’s eyes widened as he watched her hand get nearer and nearer to the dead animal.