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“...don’t let them talk you into letting one or both of them ride in the front seat,” Aunt Wendy says, glaring sternly at her daughters, “and I told them they could pick one movie to watch before bed after they brushed their teeth and put on their pajamas. We’ll try to be home around nine, so don’t worry about putting them to bed. ”
“Cousin Jack! Cousin Jack!” Charlotte dances around him. “We can watch Elsa cousin Jack!”
“Elsa, Elsa, Elsa,” sings Helena, almost to herself, as she dances her dolphin-shark (it’s a plush dolphin but for some reason Jack has been unable to determine the entire family refers to it as a shark) along the kitchen counters in the family's rental. “Elsa, Elsa, Elsa.”
Jack looks inquiringly at his aunt, who laughs. “They’re talking about Frozen,” she says. And then, because Jack apparently doesn’t move fast enough to cover his utterly blank expression, “it’s a Disney movie? Idina Menzel? ‘Let it Go’?”
That rings a faint bell. “I think Bi--I think one of my teammates at Samwell had that song on his playlists.” He’ll have to ask Bitty later, if only because Bitty enjoys teasing him about being clueless about pop music references.
Alicia and Bob and Wendy and Greg are having a couples’ night out because Jack has offered to take Charlotte and Helena to Chatham for a pizza dinner at the Box Office Cafe, which they had done last year and had now (according to the twins) become a tradition.
It’s a beautiful afternoon, and after Jack secures the girls’ seat belts in the back of his parents’ CRV, makes sure he has his wallet and phone and sunglasses, and everyone’s waved goodbye to everyone else at the top of the drive, they head out.
It’s a forty minute drive down the Cape to Chatham, during which Helena and Charlotte keep up a constant stream of chatter about the kids at their Montessori school back in Albany, the end-of-year school play, what they had for dinner the night before, what they’re looking forward to having for dinner, the characters in Frozen (at least he thinks that’s who they’re talking about), and the inner lives of dolphin-shark and Charlotte’s battered American Girl doll, Merida, who is along for the ride.
Jack’s missed this during his time at Samwell. Being around kids for whom your presence in their lives is mostly incidental. When he was coaching before Samwell he worked with kids ages 5-11 and even though he actually got something resembling a hockey team out of the 8-9 and 10-11 year old groups, his favorite to work with were the 5-7 year olds. Mostly, they were just excited to strap on their skates at the start of every practice and ram around the ice chasing the hockey puck. They couldn’t keep track of who was on what team, and except for a few worryingly-serious ones never bothered to remember the rules. Jack’s main job during practice was to make sure everyone left the ice more or less in one piece and got a juice box and a cookie for their trouble. As long as he kept them fed and safe and let them play on the ice they didn’t care who he was, why he was there, they had no expectations that he make something of his life. They just wanted him to skate with them on the ice and be there to catch them when they stumbled.
Maybe he could talk to George about doing some sort of volunteer work with kids, Jack thinks, as they pass the “Welcome to Chatham, Massachusetts!” sign and he slows to match the posted speed limit. He hadn't really thought about how much he'd missed it until now.
They stop in downtown Chatham first because Jack wants to get a bird identification book at the Yellow Umbrella. He lets the girls each pick out a book too. Helena picks a book about a princess and a pony and Charlotte selects a an illustrated selection of Pippi Longstocking stories that Jack vaguely remembers from his own childhood bookshelf.
“We can read these tonight after the movie,” he says, as he hands over his debit card and to the clerk ringing up their sale.
“Elsa! We’re gonna watch Elsa!” Charlotte tells the clerk. “Because Mom and Dad are on a date and we get to play with cousin Jack.”
“Aren’t you lucky!” the clerk responds with a smile, handing Jack the receipt to sign, and then his card and the books in a bright yellow bag.
They drive to the Box Office Cafe, south of the town center along Route 28. It’s early for the dinner crowd, especially since the cafe is now has a liquor license, but Jack’s happy not to have to wait for a table. They order and then he lets the girls bounce around a bit on the big sofas in the front windows while he nurses a Spindrift iced tea lemonade and checks his phone.
The team chat has been quiet the past few days, with everyone dispersed for the holiday weekend, some of them starting summer jobs. Shitty and Lardo both text him privately, every so often, but they’ve been spending the long weekend up in Burlington, Vermont, and Shitty had explained they were going to be communing with nature and thus would be leaving their cell phones powered down until they got back to Boston. Jack suspects (and Bitty had agreed with him when consulted) that “communing with nature” likely involved levels of nudity potentially unprecedented among the incoming class of Harvard Law. But as Shits and nudity had kind of gone together like two birds of a feather for the past four years, this speculation leaves Jack none the wiser when it comes to Shitty and Lardo’s relationship status.
Then again, since he hasn’t told either of them (and he doesn’t think Bitty has either, since Bitty would probably ask first) that he and Bitty are dating he doesn’t really have any room to gripe about relationship ambiguity.
Bitty’s been antiquing with his mother today, which means that his usual ongoing commentary in both the group and their own private text log is interspersed with photographs of the weirder of his finds. “Blarf! A New and Exciting Game!” reads the most recent image in the group text, Bitty’s hand holding up the cover of a board game box. Should I get this for the Halloween kegster??? he’d asked, and of course Ransom and Holster had wholeheartedly approved.
In Jack’s private text log is another photo of battered Kodak manual, “How to Make Good Pictures.” Below the image Bitty had typed the subtitle in all caps: EVERY PICTURE MAKER SHOULD READ Jack!! I’m buying this for you.
Jack smiles and types back, I could probably use the help.
“Take a picture cousin Jack,” Charlotte instructs, running up to where he’s sitting at their table and mugging for the camera. They’re interrupted, though, by the waiter who arrives with the order. The girls get plain cheese (their usual) while Jack’s ordered the “Beetlejuice” -- all the menu items have movie-themed names -- a pizza which features vegan chicken, blueberries, and BBQ sauce. He’d ordered it mostly because he imagines how horrified Bitty will be when he sends a photo -- except as he bites into the first piece he realizes it’s surprisingly good.
After they’ve settled into their meal, Jack takes a few photos of the girls as Charlotte had requested and then says, “How about one all together?” They crowd on one side of the table, Charlotte issuing instructions while Helena watches the image on Jack’s screen silently but with great interest. He snaps a few photos in a row, so he can get them all past the plastic smile-for-the-camera stage, reaching around with his free hand to surprise-tickle Charlotte on the ribs. Helena, always the quieter and more self-contained of the two, holds dolphin-shark close and smiles private smiles that Jack suspects only dolphin-shark -- and probably Charlotte -- understand.
“You should put us on Facebook,” Charlotte says next, pulling her orange juice across the table and getting up on her knees on the chair to suck noisily on the straw.
“I don’t use Facebook,” Jack says. Charlotte gapes at him in exaggerated surprise. “But we could send it to your mom and dad?” He definitely knows how to send photos by text. Charlotte allows this would be acceptable and Jack pulls up Aunt Wendy’s contact information and then flips through the images in his gallery until he finds his favorite. Then he sends the text with a note: C wanted you to know we are having a good time.
He sends the same picture to Bitty (dinner in Chatham, maybe next year you’ll be able to join us?) and then for good measure takes a picture of the pizza in front of him and sends that too with the query You’re the chef. How does a pizza with vegan chicken, blueberries, and BBQ sauce work? Explain.
The emoji that comes back is a little round face with its mouth open wide with laughter and tears pouring out of its eyes.
When they get back to his aunt and uncle’s rental, Jack serves up chocolate pudding cups from the fridge and settles with the girls in front of his laptop where he can stream Frozen with a twin nestled in the crook of each arm -- warm, heavy bodies already drooping with the boneless exhaustion of six-year-olds who’ve been going like perpetual motion machines since sunrise.
They make it about halfway through the movie before first Helena and then Charlotte falls forward into his lap in full-on slumber. He can’t reach the laptop without moving enough to risk waking them, so he lets the movie finish playing through the final credits (and yes, the song was one he remembers from Bitty’s kitchen playlists). The film is surreal in the manner of all Disney films: talking animals, characters that burst into song at startling moments, a plot that gestures toward the Anderson tale he remembers from childhood with a strange blend of ironic commentary and earnest good faith..
As Jack watches it comes back to him -- a half-remembered conversation at the Haus -- that Ransom and Holster had gone to see this movie in the theater on one of their “date nights.” (Everyone on the team has been saying it with air quotes for so long, including Holster and Ransom, that if they ever do ‘fess up to being in each others’ pants Jack thinks the air quotes will probably follow them to their graves.) They’d come home raving about it, and their post-game analysis had turned into a five-way debate between the two of them, Shitty, Lardo, and Bitty, and lasted through the consumption of an entire pan of Bittle brownies. Jack remembers terms like genderfucked and unabashedly feminist and queering the narrative. The fact that as he’s watching he finds himself nodding, internally, to the Shitty-like discourse in his head, thinking, Yeah, this is pretty damn gay is probably proof that he’s a) he’s forever scarred from living with Shitty, and b) he’s pretty damn gay and probably just needs to own it. Because Elsa is making him tear up a little, even with his cousins drooling on his thighs. He’s rooting for her.
It’s nice, he thinks, as the credits stop rolling and his laptop screen goes black. It’s nice that kids like Charlotte and Helena have a better chance than he’d had even five, ten years ago, of knowing -- and actually believing -- that it’s okay to grow up to be someone like Queen Elsa or Uncle Billy and Uncle Yannick, or someone like Bitty, or, well, someone like Jack.
It’s still a weird thing to realize, how to kids his cousins age -- even teenagers -- probably think of him as a grown-up now, as someone who’s got his life figured out when he’s still taking it day by day a lot of the time.
But day by day feels a lot less scary than it used to, even a year ago.