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Helen invites Steve to the Barnes family Christmas.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” she says, as they sit on her back porch. It’s a surprisingly good day, and he’s glad he came to visit her on the one nice day that week. “But there are a lot of people there who would love to meet you. Don’t you think, you two?”
She’s babysitting two of her grandkids that day, ten year old Hudson and three year old Lula. Lula doesn’t look up from the doll that she’s sprinkling grass clippings over, but Hudson drags his eyes from his Nintendo long enough to say, “You should come, Uncle Steve, it’s lots of fun. Auntie Ruth is good at cooking things.”
And it’s Hudson’s vote of confidence that brings him to the gathering.
Attire, for the various branches of the Barnes family that are in attendance, is extremely varied. Steve is wearing what Helen describes as ‘a lovely medley of maroon and khaki.’ One of the tweenagers is wearing a Nike sweatshirt and shorts. Helen is dressed, as her favorite grandson Henry later says to Steve, like a granny.
“You must be Steve.” Henry says upon their first meeting, sidling over with a glass of eggnog is one hand.
“I am.” Says Steve, who’s standing in one corner, sipping some sort of lavender concoction that Helen insisted is ‘some of her finest mixology’ and trying his best not to draw attention.
“Henry Mercer.”
“You’re Henry?”
Henry takes a surreptitious slurp of eggnog. “Heard of me, have you?”
“I have.”
“I’m a bit of a celebrity around here.” Henry breaks eye contact to examine his fingernails, and then bursts out laughing. “Jesus, Steve, don’t look so appalled.”
“I’m not-”
“I can tone it down if you want.”
“It’s okay.”
“Good. ‘Cause Gama’s tasked me with showing you around the present.”
“Don’t get too excited, Henry’s pretty boring.” Says a voice from behind Henry, and Steve about has a heart attack as a very familiar blue eyed man steps into his field of view.
“Don’t keel over, Steve, it’s just Matthew.” Says Henry, “Genetics do some funny things, huh?”
“Uh-huh.” Steve says.
“Should I get some smelling salts?” Henry asks Matthew.
“You could throw your eggnog on him.” Matthew suggests.
“Not near your Gama’s carpet!” Yells a faux-blonde middle aged lady from across the room.
“I’m okay.” Steve insists.
“Sorry about my mother,” Henry says, “She’s like…. Carpet-man or something. Superman for carpets. Can’t do anything near a carpet when she’s around.”
Matthew laughs at that. Steve thinks he’s trying too hard.
“Come on.” Henry wraps an arm around Steve’s shoulders and leads him toward the kitchen. “I’ll introduce you to some people.”
Henry’s first move is to drag him over to another teenager, sitting on barstools in the kitchen with yet another cousin, this one ten or so, and leaning over long list of what look like supreme court cases, half of them familiar to Steve- Marbury versus Madison, Gideon versus Wainwright, Dred Scott versus Sanford- and half unfamiliar- Loving versus Virginia, Miranda versus Arizona, Tinker versus Des Moines.
“Jordan, come on,” Henry grumbles, “It’s Christmas! That’s a holiday. Put away the government stuff.”
“AP Gov is no joke, Henry.” The teenager says.
“You know,” says Henry, “I took AP Gov in ninth grade.”
“They changed the scheduling requirements.” He replies, snapping the folder shut. “This is Steve, huh?”
“Yup,” Matthew gestures between the two of them, “Steven Rogers; Jordan Sewell.”
“Pleasure to meet you.”
There’s no one actively cooking at the moment, but the oven timer starts going off, startling Steve, and a woman of about seventy ambles into the kitchen and pulls three roast chickens out of the oven, before turning to Steve, Henry, Matthew, and Jordan. “Would you boys go and call everyone for dinner?” The four of them oblige, Henry heading for the dining room, Jordan downstairs to the lounge, and Matthew out to the back porch and yard to gather their various relatives.
The woman then turns to Steve. “Steven Rogers.”
“Ruth?”
She smiles, widely, coming to hug him.
“You look good.”
“Don’t flatter me dear, I know I look old.”
It’s true, sure, but she’s still retained her youth, to an extent. She’s seventy-four, if his mental math is right- he hasn’t seen her since she was seven. She doesn’t look seventy. Then again, everyone seems to look a lot younger these days. He’d mentioned that to Helen. She’d blamed it on something called retinol.
“You look great.” Steve insists, as various Barnes’ begin flooding the kitchen, lining up along the counter, grabbing paper plates and arranging themselves so that the littlest children are in the front of the line.
Henry comes back in, grabbing Steve’s arm and attempting to pull him to the front of the slowly forming line. “It’s your first Christmas since getting defrosted, you’re going first.” Ruth looks like she agrees with this reasoning, but Steve extricates himself from Henry’s grasp and goes to the back of the line.
Once he’s got his food, Steve turns to Henry. “Am I supposed to sit somewhere specific?”
“What does your paper say?”
“What paper?”
“Jeez. Jaden!”
“What?” Jaden Parkett, Kitty’s nine year old great granddaughter, shouts from the dining room.
“Oh.” Steve pulls a slip of paper out of the pocket of his khakis. “This?” Jaden had come around with a plastic cup full of paper slips and had asked Steve to pick one. Assuming this was a game children play these days, Steve had, but hadn’t really looked at it- Helen had been insistently trying to give him a very lavender mocktail at the time.
“Never mind!” Henry yells at Jaden. “Yeah- that says what room you're in. We do it random, you know? So people aren’t all trying to sit on top of each other on the comfy chairs in the dining room.”
Steve chuckles. “It’s got a K on it.”
“That means you’re at the kitchen table. Over there.” Henry points to the wooden table in the back corner of the kitchen. An assortment of chairs have been crammed into it, trying to fit everyone. Not seeing any familiar faces, Steve makes his way over, while Henry disappears into the living room, where a folding table and chairs have been set up.
There’s only one seat left, a chair that looks about as old as Steve. He sets his plate down and pulls the chair out, and sits down. The chair legs scrape loudly against the well-vacuumed white oak flooring.
“Who wants to say a prayer?” An old man, who Steve vaguely recognizes as Helen’s husband Morris, from the framed photos on the wall, asks, “Steve?”
Steve is about to insist someone else do it, politely, of course, when he realizes that Morris isn’t talking to him. The man next to him, a silver haired but still quite handsome man in his sixties, nods. “Sure.” He holds out his hand to Steve Steve, who takes it, turning to take the hand of the small boy on his other side.
“Dear God, we’d like to thank you for all that you do for us every day. For our amazing and beautiful families and dearest friends. Thank you for the delicious food on our table and for the people who prepared it for us. And especially for the strength you give us to power through life, even in the darkest of times.” He continues a few more sentences, mostly hitting the well-worn holiday platitudes, though there are a few sentiments he lands on that Steve finds rather meaningful. “Also thanks for defrosting Captain Icicle, here.” There are chuckles around the table as everyone mumbles ‘Amen.’
Steve reaches for his fork.
“Speaking of,” says the other Steve, “Captain Icicle, pleasure to meet you.”
Steve shakes his hand. “Sorry, I don’t know-”
“It’s no problem. Steven Matthews, I’m Frances’ son.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” says Steve, “I think Helen mentioned you to me.”
“Yeah, yeah, Aunt Helen’s great. I’d heard you were spending a lot of time with her. It’s good to see you here, by the way, there was a lot of back and forth in the family group chat about whether or not you were coming. Aunt Helen said she had invited you, but a lot of people figured- well, you know. There are a lot of people here, people you don’t really know.”
“Figured I’d meet them sooner or later.”
“I’m sure. I was going- Lucas Morton, what are you doing?”
The comment was directed at the small boy next to him, who having eaten three bites of chicken, four bites of mashed potatoes, and half a dinner roll and having smushed a handful of mac and cheese into the green beans his mother had forced onto his plate was turned around in his seat, smushing pieces of macaroni into the carved decorations of the chair.
Once Lucas had been admonished, the macaroni removed from the chair, and Steven had threatened to return the boy to his mother, Steve took the opportunity to ask about him.
“Lucas is Aunt Kitty’s great grandson. So, Lucas’ mother, Gabrielle- her father, Roger, was Kitty’s only child. Roger and I were very close growing up, so I now find myself frequently responsible for Lucas and his sisters. Like I don’t have three grandchildren of my own.” Steven chuckles. “I don’t mind them, though. Lucas is sweet. Despite the-” He gestures at Lucas, who’s trying to balance the remains of his dinner roll on his nose. “His birthday’s the twenty third, and I think he’s still got a sugar high from all the cake.”
“Really?” Says Steve, “How old are you, Lucas?”
Lucas frowns as the distraction causes him to drop his bread. He disappears under the table, but returns expediently, roll in hand. “Three.”
Steve thoroughly enjoys dinner. Steven Matthews and Lucas Morton are excellent company, especially since Steven is the resident Barnes family historian and knows everyone and how they relate to each other- an impressive feat, Steve thinks, as the family tree Steven’s drawing him reaches its third serviette.
He the rest of his table mates are likewise interesting in conversation- Morris Schoelmann, Helen’s husband; Janet Stuart, Rebecca’s daughter; Beatrice Beck, Ruth’s daughter; Henry’s sister Valerie (Helen’s granddaughter); and Jonathan White and Sebastian Ruiz, the respective partners of Ruth’s two granddaughters.
Jonathan and Sebastian pretend to include him in their discussion of college basketball, he listens to Beatrice tell him about the business she opened three years ago, and Morris gives him a long explanation of his miraculous new hearing aids, which Steve is suitably impressed by.
“It’s like magic! I think I can hear the earth rotating!” Morris tells Steve for a fifth time in the line for dessert, after Steven abandons them to chase an errant grandchild- either his or Roger’s, Steve’s not sure.
“Hi, Steve. Hi, Grandad.” Henry joins the back of the line behind them. “How’s the kitchen table?”
“Lovely,” Steve tells him, “I’ve had some very interesting conversations.”
“Did Beatrice tell you about her business?”
“She did, actually. How was the living room?”
“Eh. Lucy pulled Hudson’s chair out from under him when he was trying to sit down, and he fell on Tammy- that’s Steven’s daughter- and her chair broke, and she thinks she sprained her wrist, but Auntie Ruth says she’s being dramatic. And Thomas- my second cousin Emily’s baby- spat up milk all over the carpet, and also all over Blair’s sweet potatoes- Blair is Lucas’ sister, you met Lucas. Anyway, Blair wasn’t looking, and tried to eat it anyway, but we stopped her, thankfully.”
“That’s good.” Steve says, absently. “What sort of pie do you recommend?”
“Aunt Norah makes a good apple pie.” Steve takes a slice of the apple pie, not bothering to discover the identity of the mysterious Aunt Norah. “Steve! Whipped cream.” Henry grabs a tall, thin can, and presses down the nozzle on top, squirting a liberal amount of whipped cream on Steve’s pie.
“Uh… thanks.” Says Steve, who was not expecting the can to do what it had done.
“You’re welcome.”
Dessert is a slightly more mobile affair, the seating arrangements thoroughly forgotten. Henry drags Steve into the finished basement.
“People don’t come down here as much, so the charcuterie board might still have cheese.” He explains.
It does. They seat themselves on the couches, where Henry inhales two slices of pie, a slice of cake, two brownies, and a healthy serving of Eton mess, before turning his attention to the remaining charcuterie, selecting a water cracker, liberally coating it in brie, adding an olive, a slice of salami, some prosciutto, and a grape and passing it to Steve. Steve thanks him as he begins construction of his own cracker.
A table tennis ball flies past Henry’s ear, and the two of them spin around to see a collection of sheepish cousins and second cousins all between Henry’s age and Lucas’ sister’s age.
“My bad.” Says Hudson, ambling around the table to collect the fugitive table tennis ball, which had rolled to a stop by the bookshelf.
Steve remains after the meal for far longer than he had expected to. He talks to Steven Matthews again, and enjoys it very much. Steven tells him about his work as a worship leader in the Bronx and gives Steve a standing invitation to come to one of his services. He talks to Ruth, for a long time. And he meets new people. Ruth’s son Thomas, an electrician who also coaches high school wrestling. Matthew (and his younger brother Aidan)’s father, Quentin, who goes by Quinn, and who Steve thinks he’s seen before.
“You have seen me before,” Quinn confirms.
“Where?” Steve asks, curious.
“I can’t tell you that,” Quinn says, and Steve makes a mental note to ask Nick Fury about him.
As the evening goes on, the crowd thins out. Quinn says goodbye to Steve, heads out the door with his two sons in tow. Tammy, the first cousin some number of times removed who thought Hudson had done grievous damage to her wrist, leaves with her husband and daughter, holding ice in a dish towel against her injured appendage. Henry’s sister Valerie, spinning the loop of her keys around her fingers bids her grandparents goodbye and heads off in the direction of her car, all the while complaining about how far away she’s had to park.
Henry’s volunteered to drive Steve home, but he’s nowhere to be found as the rest of the family is saying their goodbyes and filing out the door and onto the street, which is positively packed with vehicles. Steve asks a few people if they’ve seen him, but no one has, not recently, anyway, so Steve takes a seat in the living room to wait around for him.
He’s about to ask someone else if they could take him, the great niece whom Helen had arranged for him to ride up with having left after dessert, when he is accosted by Ruth and Helen.
“We wanted to get you by yourself.” Ruth explains. Helen nods in agreement, setting two wrapped Christmas presents on the coffee table.
“We got you a few things,” Helen continues, “You can open the little one, but save the big one for when you get home.”
“Thanks,” Says Steve, not sure what else to say. Helen nudges the smaller box towards him, and he gently opens the wrapping, setting it to the side and sliding out the cardboard box within it.
“We got you a box!” Ruth gives him an amused smile. “It’s to put all of your happy memories in.”
“Well, you could do that,” says Helen, “But there are also things inside the box.”
Steve chuckles, opening the box.
“We thought you might want to get back to your art,” Helen clarifies, patting Steve’s shoulder familiarly.
There’s a variety of pencils, pens, and paper inside the plain cardboard box. Steve picks up the notebook on top, turns it over in his hands, then sets it to the side. “Thank you so much.”
“No problem.”
“Am I still supposed to be hiding to lure Steve into your trap, Gama?” Henry asks Helen, sticking his head into the living room.
“No, Henry, you’re fine.” Says Helen, patting the couch next to her. Henry comes to join them.
“What were you guys doing, anyway?” He wonders, propping his feet up next to the other box, which is still sitting, wrapped in sparkly snowflake wrapping paper, on the coffee table.
“Giving Steve his Christmas present.” Says Ruth.
“Can I give him his Christmas present from me?”
“If you want to.”
“Cool. I gotta go get it, though. Stay here.” Henry stands up, hurrying out of the room. They can hear the front door closing behind him.
“He’s sweet.” Ruth says to Helen.
“He’s crazy most of the time.” Helen responds.
“Carolyn did a good job with him.”
“She sure did.”
Steve assumes that Carolyn is the faux-blonde woman whom Henry described as ‘Carpet-Man’.
“How did meeting everyone go?” Ruth asks him.
“Good. Everyone was nice, and the food was really good.”
“Morris tells me you ate about an entire chicken on your own.” Helen laughs, “I’d say you thought it was extremely good.”
“Extremely good, then. Best I’ve eaten in… awhile.”
“Have you figured out how to use your oven yet?”
“Yes,” Says Steve. He has figured out how to work the oven, but he’s still afraid of the supermarket and doesn’t know many good recipes. Bucky had always been the better cook.
“I’ll send Henry over in the next few days to help you with that.” Says Helen.
Speak of the devil, the front door slams open and Henry skids into the front hall, cheeks pink with the cold outside.
“I found it!” He holds up the present he had gone to fetch. “Here.” He holds it out to Steve, then sits back down next to Helen.
“Thanks.” Steve says, mentally kicking himself for not getting anyone else a present. He slides a thumb nail underneath the tape, and slowly tears the paper, pulling it away to reveal a book.
“It was written by the people from my favorite podcast.” Henry explains.
Steve runs his fingers across the cover of Captain America: Higher Order Hero, by Brandon Gerber and Zeke Graham. “Thanks, Henry. I’ll give it a look.”
“I wasn’t sure whether or not you wanted a book about yourself.” Henry tells him, “But I wasn’t sure what else to get you, and this book’s pretty funny.”
“It’s great.” Steve assures him, “I’ll put it next on my list of books to read.”
He talks to Ruth and Helen a little while longer before he and Henry bundle up and head out into the cold. They have to walk four blocks to get to where Henry had parked his dinged up Toyota Camry. Henry attempts to unlock it with the non-functional key fob before unlocking the driver’s side door the old fashioned way and climbing in, reaching for the lock on the passenger side.
They sit in silence for a very long time, only broken by Steve giving Henry directions on where to go.
“So, your grandmother talks about pretty much nothing but you,” Steve says to Henry, who turns red.
“Jeez. Yeah, it’s surprising that she does that. I would think she’d be embarrassed by me, but nope.” Henry takes a left at Steve’s direction. “My cousins all think I’m her favorite. I don’t know why I would be, I’m a disaster, but I’m the one she talks about to all of her friends.”
Steve shrugs. “From what I’ve heard, she thinks you’re smart. She thinks you’re going places, know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean, but Steve. C’mon. I may be going places, but those places aren’t the kind of places you brag to your other old lady friends about at bingo. Nah.” He takes one hand off the wheel, rests his elbow against the car window. “No, I work on some sort of helpline for support services, answering the phone, you know what I mean, I’m terrible at my job, and I don’t do much outside of it. I was interesting in high school, but I’m not in high school anymore. The term ‘peaked’ kind of applies, you know, but I wasn’t a jock, and I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I didn’t play sports, and I was the kind of guy everyone thought would peak in his mid-thirties, and maybe I was kind of weird, but eventually I would come into my own and be a brilliant engineer with girls falling over themselves to get with me, and I’d finally have a cool haircut.”
“Your haircut’s fine,” says Steve.
“Gee, thanks,” Henry replies.
“Well, Henry,” Steve starts, “I don’t know you, but I doubt Helen’s wrong. She’s a lot older than both of us, you know, if you don’t count…” He waves away the years in the ice with his hand. “She knows you better than me, and she clearly loves you very much. Maybe a vote of confidence is what you need.”
“Maybe,” Henry says, and pulls over to the curb in front of Steve’s building. “This you?”
“Sure is.” Steve wrestles with the door handle for a moment, before Henry realizes it’s locked and tries to explain how to unlock it, eventually giving up and reaching across Steve to do it himself. “Hey, thanks for driving me, Henry.”
“Swell of me, was it?” Henry teases.
Steve rolls his eyes. “Sure. We’ll call it that.”
He goes inside, turns on the light. Gets ready for bed mechanically. As he’s brushing his teeth, Steve tries to remember everyone he’d met that evening. Henry. Steven, Matthew, Lucas, Morris, Blair, Roger- No, he hadn’t met Roger, Roger was dead, and even for a guy with super-soldier memory, Bucky has too many family members now.
As he drops back onto his bed, scoots under the covers, Steve finally thinks of the evening in relation to Bucky. And to Winnie, to George. He tries to picture Becca and Kitty and Frances at those holiday gatherings, and realizes Frances, dead not even three years after Bucky, wouldn’t have experienced anything like it. But it’s all too easy to picture Becca and Kitty there, especially Becca, whom he had watched grow into an amazing mother in the few years before he shipped out.
And what would Bucky have been like at a modern Barnes Christmas? He’d always liked the little kids, his youngest sisters, and then later the only nephew he got to meet. Steve can picture him with Lucas, with Jaden, playing silly pretend games and fake-wrestling with them. He can see Bucky reaching into the dishes of food prematurely, one of his sisters smacking away his hand before he could eat too many illicit green beans. He’d think that spray whipped cream thing was neat.
And that is where Steve stops imagining, because Bucky not meeting his great-nephew is all very well, but him never getting to experience the minimal joy of whipped cream in a can is just a bit more than Steve can handle.
He rolls over, goes back to recalling each face. Beatrice, Matthew, Carolyn, Emily, the mysterious ‘Aunt Norah’. And Ruth and Helen, too. He should count them, shouldn’t he? Especially Ruth, it being his first time seeing her since 1943. He doesn’t know either of them anymore, sans the short few hours he’s spent with Helen in the past six weeks.
And now he knows the facts of their lives: they married, Helen has three kids, Ruth has two. They both have grandchildren, and Ruth’s first great grandson is five months old. Helen became a teacher, she taught high school geography for forty years. Ruth trained as a nurse, and though she took time away from her career to raise her son and daughter, she went back to it once they were in school. Steve had spent twenty minutes sitting with her that evening, and she had told him how she was inspired by stories of Steve’s mother; though Sarah died before Ruth was old enough to remember her.
And so, Steve knows the framework. He knows the beams and columns holding up their lives, but he doesn’t truly know them, for meeting a person’s skeleton is not at all the same as meeting them whole and healthy. He once knew them both that way, when they were little girls whom he saw every few days, who he would entertain with his drawings, sitting at the table with them and drawing little doodles at their request, showing them how to imitate what he did when he put pencil to paper. Surely, those girls are inside them somewhere, in their hearts, and yet heart and bone also do not compromise a whole person.
And what does? Steve wonders. How much of them must he know before he knows them fully? Will he ever reach that point?
No, he supposes, because surely he was only known a few whole people in his life. Surely he has not known his whole self, either, which doesn’t make much sense to him, but, lying on his back, in the dark, haunted more by the present, the present where he is the one that’s different, not them, where in what is to him three years, he has changed more than they have in sixty, he can’t hide from the fact that it’s the truth.