The Precious One Read Online Free PDF

D been to my father’s house, it was December, three days after what had been the best Christmas my mom, Marcus, and I had spent in as long as I could remember. It wasn’t the first Christmas after “the combustion” as we had taken to calling it, “separation” being far too bland a term for what had befallen our family. Despite all our best efforts, that first Christmas had been grim beyond saving, a kind of nuclear winter: the three of us still so raw and stinging, tripping over one another in a blank-walled, rented apartment; all of us working part-time jobs we detested; my mother edgy from nights spent studying for the North Carolina bar exam instead of sleeping; Marcus and I making our lonely, resentful, anonymous ways toward graduation at our enormous new high school.
    But the second Christmas, the one right before we embarked on the first and seemingly final visit to the home of my father and his new family, had been good. Very good. It had been downright merry, a fact that took all three of us by surprise. That fall, we had moved from the dreary apartment to a tidy little Craftsman-style frosted petit four of a house, butter-yellow and white with tall windows, a porch,and trees in the yard. My mom had gotten the kind of tireless-lawyer-with-a-heart-of-gold job she had always wanted, and Marcus and I were in college—mine just down the road, his at a rival school a few hours away in Virginia. It had turned out that college suited us. After a two-week-long mourning period, at least on my end, even being apart from each other for the first time ever seemed to suit us. Unpaired, we were pure potential, free agents. Marcus wasn’t the smart but smart-aleck wayward brother; I was not the goody-two-shoes-but-for-one-cataclysmic-error sister. We could feel those four years stretched out before us, wide open, white as linen.
    Still, when Christmas break rolled around, we were happy to see each other. In fact, I was giddy about the whole thing, suffused with holiday spirit, and even Marcus, who didn’t go in for giddiness, kept committing spontaneous, weirdly unsarcastic acts like buying and then stringing the porch with white twinkle lights. We spent Christmas Day at our house with the large, loud, motley family my mother had acquired in the year or so since she had moved back to her childhood town: her father, our Grampa Pete; her high school best friend, Wiley, and his partner, Jack; the family next door—a surgeon, her stay-at-home-dad husband, and their two kids; the young couple who owned a gelato place in town; Mrs. Wickett, my mother’s fourth-grade math teacher and her tiny, guitar-playing husband. We feasted on beef tenderloin and a bewildering array of pies. We told stories and laughed. We—and I am not kidding— sang carols in front of the fire . It was corny and Capra-esque and beyond beautiful.
    Three days later, we went to my father’s house, where the joy came to a screeching halt.
    It might not have been so bad if my father’s house had not, at that point, been our house, the one in which we had lived back when we were a family. The new family in the old house, my wallpaper on Willow’s wall, felt just plain cruel. Although in truth, it’s hard to imagine that day being any less bad or any more bad than it was because the whole thing felt fated, like it was all meant to be and all meant to bejust exactly—to the loudest insult and the smallest teardrop—as bad as it was. I know I’m not explaining it very well. It was like that As You Like It quote: my father’s house was a stage and we were merely players, trapped in a play written by someone a whole lot less funny and bighearted than William Shakespeare. Even as we made our way up the familiar brick sidewalk to the familiar door, I heard doom in every step.
    We walked single file—my mother, me, Marcus—each of us holding a wrapped gift.
    “Like the effing adoration of the effing magi,” Marcus mumbled.
    Even though I know she knew