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She’d been able to stick around all morning, but time and a half wasn’t something to mess around with. Even at eleven, he understood that. Ma had made the four of them breakfast, something more than cereal—french toast with syrup and eggs and sausage. And had laid out their sparse presents under the tree the night before, had made everything as perfect as she could make it, their first Christmas with Dad gone.
Not that he had ever been much help.
He was happy that Dad was gone. Happy, in a strange way, to get away from the old house outside the city.
The house was tied up in litigation. Foggy was only eleven and didn’t particularly understand what that meant, except that Ma had to shuffle the four of them out of their old home and into a tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen because they couldn’t live there anymore. Something about Dad’s cousin technically being the one to own the land, even if Dad owned the house, and Ma’s name was nowhere on the deed, because she was only seventeen when she and Dad got married.
Ma was twenty-eight, and rundown, so Foggy waited up for her to get off her double shift at the diner. Not necessarily sad, he thought, but tired. Happier in the same way that he was, that his brother and sisters were too young to understand or be.
He’d put them all to bed hours ago after making grilled cheeses for dinner and giving Fiona a bath, tucked them into the bedroom the three of them were still young enough to share while he took the couch and turned the lights off one by one until only the soft colored lights on the tree remained. Caroline had padded out from the room a little after ten, wiping her eyes and asking for Ma, so he’d held her on the couch, turned on the radio, and sung Christmas carols until her eyes began to droop, and then set her back onto the cot she’d taken to sleeping on.
“Hey, kiddo.” Ma’s voice woke him a bit after 11 PM, and Foggy jerked awake from his place at the table, a little mad that he’d fallen asleep. “You need your sleep, honey. Don’t need to be waiting up for me.”
She smiled at him regardless, collapsing into the chair across the table from him and shucking off her scuffed white sneakers and propping her feet up on the empty seat next to her. She pulled her tips from the night out of her apron before untying it and letting it fall to the floor, sinking her hands into her long blonde hair, pulling it loose from its tight ponytail.
To eleven-year-old Foggy, there was no prettier woman on the face of the planet than Rosemary Nelson.
“Wanted to,” he answered, a little awkwardly, his hand finding the box he’d tucked into his pocket. “I wanted to give you this. It’s not really Christmas anymore, but—”
“Oh, Franklin,” she sighed, mouth curving in the kind of way that spoke to the kind of emotion that made eleven-year-old boys squirm. “I told you not to.”
“I saved enough from the paper route, and I wanted to,” he protested, sliding the haphazardly wrapped package across the table to his mother. “You deserve something pretty at Christmas, Ma.” If only because her leg still turned in funny when she walked, if only because of the shiny stripe of scar tissue under her chin. If only because Robert Nelson never bothered, and the son of a bitch is long gone now and so Foggy is going to be the man of the house and take care of his mother. “I wanted to.”
She sighed again then, eyes shining as she looked across the table at him with her lopsided smile. “You’re turning into quite the obstinate one, you know. Not that I mind, particularly. My little Franklin, growing up into a fine man.”
Reaching across the table to ruffle his hair, she let him slide the box into her grasp. He tried not to squirm uncomfortably when she unwrapped it, happy to give it to her but a bit discomfited by the tears running down her cheeks, even if they’re happy ones. “Oh honey,” she murmured, wiping her eyes when she pulled the necklace—a slim silver treble clef on a delicate chain, real silver, he had checked—from its little velveteen box. “I love it.”
It was then that she realized that the radio was on, Christmas music drifting out from the speakers, something upbeat and in three-four that Foggy couldn’t recognize. He was the only one of the four of them who had showed any of Ma’s musical talent so far, and he smiled a bit, only rolling his eyes in a cursory sort of way, when she stood up on her tired feet and tugged up off his chair.
(Because she was standing on her tired feet, smiling down at him. A few more inches, she had commented only a few weeks ago, until he would be taller than her. Ma was as short as Dad had been tall. A singer and a dancer who had hung up her shoes and theater ambitions when she fell pregnant her senior year of high school. Because he was the baby born two months after she had graduated, passing on dreams of getting out of that small town and getting her stuck with Robert Nelson)
She’d taught him long ago where to put his hands and soon she’s letting him waltz her around the tiny kitchen, laughing when he stumbles a bit but sings along once he recognizes the song, and then they’re both singing and Foggy thought that this was his best Christmas ever, even if Ma was teasing about saving up to send him to theatre camp for his birthday next year. The soft smile she gives him when the song ends makes Foggy realize that this just might be her best Christmas too.