The first thing she did once the last guests had left was turn to Summer, take a big, long drink of sparkling cider and mumble, “Please don’t say you told me so.”
And then she had dropped the glass bottle on her hardwood, where it shattered and spilled all over the floor, the wall and her shoes as Summer jumped out of her seat and ran to hug Josey. She held Josey as she cried and never once said “I told you so.” Nat and Rhonda had silently gone to work scrubbing the sticky drink off the floor and walls while Summer helped Josey out of her party dress and into her pajamas, into bed, all while she cried.
In the morning, she woke up to see a card on her bedside table with her name written on it in Summer’s handwriting. She cried over the poem about sisters her best friend had copied down for her inside the off-white card:
What you mean to me,
Is more than I can express.
You see, I had no sister when I was little
To call when I was in distress.
When we first met,
We had no clue,
What was getting ready to happen,
Was not completely out of the blue.
God had a plan,
Throughout all the years,
He was making us for each other,
To share life's smiles and tears.
She had underlined and redrawn the words share and tears for emphasis, and Josey sat in her bed and cried over the card for fifteen minutes before crawling out of her bed and into the spotless living room to find a miniature Christmas tree standing on her coffee table, decorated by tinsel, tiny ornaments and infinitesimal blinking white lights that stood proudly over four tiny wrapped boxes that all had tags that read To Josey.
She knew that all of her aunts and her best friend were busy that Christmas morning, but she still cried over the fact that they had stayed up late and gone out of their way to make sure she didn’t feel alone. She sent each a message of thanks after opening the tiny packages, and then regretfully spent a few hours waiting for him to call.
Somebody did call after a few hours, but it wasn’t Chas at all. To her surprise, Eric had called to wish her a merry Christmas, and she could hear the voice of his girlfriend through the line. Shortly after, she had excused herself from the call and hung up to face her apartment alone, which suddenly seemed much bigger, emptier and quieter.
When nightfall came, the rain that had begun the night before still pounded relentlessly down on the dark city of angels and demons, and she couldn’t do anything but cry. She cried over her father that had disappeared before she ever had a chance to know him, she cried over her mother that died before she could really learn to appreciate her, she cried over Richie that had taken her whole heart and ripped it to pieces before she knew what love was, she cried over Nora for giving up on life just before Josey needed her most, and she cried over Chas for turning into the one person she thought he never wanted to be again. She wasn’t sure if anybody had ever spent their entire Christmas crying, but then again, she wondered if the city of Los Angeles had ever cried along with someone.
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