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Debbie comes over for dinner in the grey early days of February, which is second-nature by this point. She is there most days, coming over while the kids are at school – one of the benefits of having enough money to not work at all, and Tammy working from home – or spending the evening or, on the weeks that Tammy’s ex-husband has the children and the house is quiet, filling in all the empty spaces so that Tammy doesn’t feel quite so alone. This all happens in that hush-hush unofficial way that things do when the two of them are the only people in the world who know the level to which they are involved.
It’s not that Tamara Maria Prescott doesn’t feel bad for not clueing her children in on this development, because she does. She feels guilty when she waits until they have gone to bed to let Debbie get close enough to touch her, and she’s almost certain that they are smart enough, attuned enough to their mother that they have picked up on something. Instead of being comforting, though, this only makes her more cautious; she physically keeps her distance from Debbie when they are around, wants lowered voices and subtleties when they have gone to sleep. She explains this to Debbie on a weekend when the kids are with Michael, grateful that the dark-haired woman is quiet enough and patient enough to allow her the time to figure out how to put words to it. “I just want to be absolutely sure before I tell them anything,” she tries, and backtracks almost immediately. “Not that I’m not sure about you, because I am, but this is obviously the first relationship I’ve been in since their father, and it’s going to be a big adjustment, and I know they basically love you but it’s probably going to change everything, and –”
It’s around then that Debbie cuts her off with a kiss, and Tammy can feel her lips curved into a smile where they press against hers, and she lets the whole matter go. For someone who has never been married and never had children and who is not even particularly good with children, Debbie understands. She wordlessly grants Tammy all the time in the world to metaphorically drag her feet. And so nobody knows about Debbie and Tammy and their kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve while the fireworks lit up the sky overhead, and that’s fine.
Or maybe Debbie’s brother and his wife know, simply because they are the only adults besides Tammy herself that the dark-haired woman seems to speak to. And maybe the host of neighbours occupying each other house on their street have noticed how much time they spend around each other; they are nosy and wide-eyed and suspicious of everything that the fabled Oceans’ daughter does, and although it has been several months since Tammy and her Halloween-costumed children first knocked on her door and pressed their ways insistently into Debbie’s life, they have never stopped giving her unsolicited advice about how she should definitely, absolutely stay away. She doesn’t know how to even begin to explain to them that they don’t know Debbie at all. They are so deeply entrenched in their narrative – the family that built this neighbourhood and cannot let anyone forget it, thinking they reside far above everyone else because all of this land once belonged to them – that they cannot comprehend anything else.
Anyway, Debbie comes over for dinner, and after Tammy has read Maggie two stories and tucked Tyler into bed and gone as far as Derek’s doorway to turn his light off and say good night, since he’s become very serious about being ten years old and wants to be treated more like a grown-up, they sit in the living room with their fingers intertwined and the TV on, though they turn down the volume until they can ignore the images on the screen altogether. The pad of Tammy’s thumb moves smoothly over the back of Debbie’s hand, back and forth and back and forth, and she turns to face the woman – her girlfriend, though they have not said the word out loud – and says, very seriously, “I don’t want you to feel like we have to do something for Valentine’s Day. Like, maybe we shouldn’t even do presents. We haven’t been doing this for very long and Valentine’s Day is sort of a stupid fake holiday, anyway, right?” This is one-part how she feels and one-part how she thinks Debbie feels, and maybe one-part fear talking. How much of her hesitance to tell her children about Debbie is for their sakes, and how much is for hers?
(Here’s the thing: People can leave. And she really, really doesn’t want to go to all the trouble of falling for Debbie Ocean and telling all the important people around her, and then being crushed when she does. If she does; she corrects her train of thought determinedly.)
Debbie is unpredictable, sometimes. Tammy is reminded of this all over again, as she often is in the day-to-day, by the reaction she gets: Debbie blinks at her slowly and replies, “Too late. I already got you something.”
“Oh,” breathes Tammy, all quiet, like Debbie’s words have knocked the wind right out of her. As they sit there in the aftermath of that confession, a low buzz of panic settles into Tammy’s veins. There is something sitting, hidden, at Debbie’s house down the street that is for her, and that means that she has under two weeks to find the perfect gift to give in return. It’s not nearly enough time and, really, she should have brought this up earlier, only she didn’t necessarily expect Debbie Ocean to be a Valentine’s Day gift sort of girl.
This leaves her to duck into every single jewelry store she sees for the next several days, aimlessly circling the store as if she expects the perfect pair of earrings to simply jump out at her. Or maybe a necklace, something that Debbie can wear proudly displayed or tucked underneath her shirt so that it rests directly next to her heart. It’s cheesy and overwhelming, trying to brainstorm gift ideas. Tammy has spent every Valentine’s Day of her life either with her ex-husband or with nobody at all, and Michael was astoundingly easy to shop for; all she had to do was find him something that he decidedly needed, and maybe a book to go along with it, and it turned out equal parts thoughtful and appreciated. She’s never bought a quote-unquote romantic gift for a woman before, and Debbie is an enigma, mysterious and often closed-off, which makes it even more difficult to find what she wants. It feels like a frustrating dream, the kind where Tammy knows there is a specific task she needs to accomplish but cannot track down the missing piece of information she needs to get it done.
Conveniently, Michael has the kids when the fourteenth of February actually rolls around, which saves Tammy the awkward nature of having to ask him to switch weekends; she’s not sure how to explain to him that while he has not found anyone new, she has, let alone that she has not told anyone yet and that their children don’t even know. She heads down the street to Debbie’s house with a gift – small and easily concealed – tucked into the pocket of her coat, trying to label all the types of apprehension and nerves knotted somewhere between her chest and her stomach. She always feels a little bit like this when she’s going to see Debbie, and she can tell that elated energy is there, the butterflies and the heartbeat-skipping, but there are a lot of other feelings to sort through, and she can barely get started before she reaches Debbie’s back door.
This is the door that Debbie prefers to use, when she’s not driving straight into her garage and waiting until the door has shut firmly after the vehicle before getting out. It’s hidden from the houses on either side by a dense layer of trees, and it’s got the added bonus of her not having to reveal herself by answering the front door – this is precisely how nearly a year went by between Tammy and the kids moving into their house, and Tammy finally seeing Debbie in person. The back door is the one where the maid service let themselves in weekly, and where Danny and Tess use their keys (Tammy still has not met them, though she hears stories and she’s sure they know things about her, too), and where Tammy knocks and then waits, holding her breath until Debbie answers.
“Hi,” she greets the other woman. Debbie stops her midway through slipping into the house, catching her wrist and then pinning her against the door to press a smiling kiss to her lips. This is the openness that Tammy likes about her, how she does things like this if nobody else is around, the strange imbalance between it and the way that she still never seems to know how to talk about her emotions. Debbie is about actions more than she is about words, and for someone who has always wanted to be reassured about other peoples’ feelings, Tammy is remarkably… okay with it. She is learning how to take the things Debbie does and translate them into what they really mean, and to reciprocate without words sometimes, too. Lifting her hands up to curl into dark hair, she draws Debbie closer to herself until they both run out of air, and that means they are both happy to see each other.
On the living room floor with flames crackling in the fireplace, casting a soft orange glow over everything, Debbie sits cross-legged and gives her a bouquet of roses. A dozen, naturally, and when Tammy makes the briefest of teasing comments about how very cliché that is, Debbie’s cheeks turn the faintest shade of pink. “I’ve never done Valentine’s Day before,” she admits, “but I wanted to get it right for you.” This borders on the level of emotional talk that she’s learned Debbie gets uncomfortable addressing, and she hurries on to point out, “There’s a card.”
And so there is, bright white tucked in amongst the deep red of the rose petals; when Tammy opens it, a folded piece of paper falls out onto her knees. Flattening it out on the floor, she finds herself looking at a list of times and places, seat numbers and hotel phone numbers. “Is this…?”
“A travel itinerary,” Debbie supplies helpfully. She looks nervous now, looking back at Tammy and lacing her fingers together in her lap like it makes it less obvious that they are shaking slightly. “I thought we could go on a trip. Somewhere interesting, somewhere warm. And I thought maybe the kids could come, so I looked up when spring break is from school, because I… I wanted it to be something for them, too.”
Something in Tammy is melting, she thinks.
Only this is a huge gesture, practically explosive, and it means probably almost definitely having to explain to Derek and Tyler and Maggie that she and Debbie are something. And besides that, it makes the simple but elegant necklace engraved with a tiny T, sitting in the pocket of Tammy’s coat where it’s draped over the armchair behind her, absolutely pale in comparison. “This is… Debbie, this is way too much,” she starts, because it is.
“Tammy, I have the money,” replies Debbie, patient and matter-of-fact. Like this is not a particularly big deal, and it’s around now that Tammy recalls her words when she passed over the roses: I’ve never done Valentine’s Day before. Leave it to Debbie Ocean to go all-out on a gift for a cheesy false holiday, not having any prior experience with it, not knowing how to conventionally share tokens of her affection. She softens as Debbie continues, “I want to do this with you. Maybe it’s more than you’re expecting – I should have floated the idea instead of just buying all the tickets, I’m sorry – I just wanted to do something, plan out an experience we could all share together. I like you. And I feel like I’m living more than I ever have before, being with you, being around them. I want you to feel like that, too.”
Wonderingly, Tammy allows her gaze to trace every line of Debbie’s face. “I love you.”
It’s the first time she has said that out loud, something that she definitely did not plan and is absolutely more cliché than Debbie giving her a dozen red roses on this day, but Debbie doesn’t miss a beat. “I love you, too.”