If the Fates Allow

  Text copyright © 2021 Rainbow Rowell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542034494

  Cover design by Micaela Alcaino

  Christmas 2020

  Reagan was carrying too much.

  Her overnight bag and groceries, plus a glass pan of Jell-O salad—too much Jell-O salad—because she didn’t have a smaller glass dish, and Grandma had always made it in a glass dish, so you could see all the colors.

  Reagan was carrying too much, and the driveway was slick as fuck. There was snow on the ground, and her grandpa hadn’t salted the driveway or shoveled his walk. She couldn’t really blame him—he never went anywhere. Her parents dropped off his groceries once a week.

  She walked extra slow, taking small steps.

  “Hey there!” a man called.

  Reagan looked up, and her foot hit a patch of ice. She went down quick, landing on one knee—and then on her hip, and then on the groceries, twisting the whole time to keep the glass pan in the air. “Fuck.”

  “Holy shit!” the same voice swore. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine!” Reagan shouted from the ground.

  “Don’t move!” Whoever it was was getting closer.

  “You don’t move—are you wearing a mask?”

  “Oh . . . no.”

  “Then stay where you are!” Reagan set the Jell-O salad on the ground. “I’m fine!”

  She pushed up onto her knees. She could see him now, the neighbors’ son—the quiet one with no chin. Standing about ten feet away from her. He had his arms out like he was still about to help her up.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No.” She was a little hurt. Her knee felt scraped, and her hip was already throbbing. She lifted herself up onto her feet—

  Then hit another patch of ice. The guy darted toward her. She caught her balance and pointed at him. “No!”

  He stopped, his hands still up. She could see his breath.

  “I swear to God, Mason”—Reagan didn’t even remember that she remembered his name—“I have been quarantining for two weeks, and I am not giving my grandpa Covid because you can’t listen.”

  “Okay,” he said. Then he pulled his scarf up over his face—and Reagan thought at first that he was trying to hide his nonexistent chin. But then she realized he was trying not to blow germs at her. “Just be careful,” he said.

  “I was being careful before you tripped me!”

  “Before I tripped you?”

  “You yelled at me!”

  “I was saying hello so that I didn’t startle you.”

  “Well, good work!”

  “Reagan?” someone new shouted. “Are you okay?”

  She looked up. Her grandpa was standing at the front door.

  “I’m fine, Grandpa!”

  “Did you fall?”

  “No, I’m fine!”

  “Let me get my coat.”

  “No, Grandpa—stay!”

  “Don’t come out, Al—it’s slick!”

  “Is that you, Mason?”

  “Yeah, don’t come out—I’ll help her.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Reagan hissed.

  “Just go,” Mason said. “Walk in the snow. It’s safer.”

  He was right. She inched over to the snow, then stepped into it—even though she was wearing ankle boots, and the snow immediately fell over the tops. She got to the porch and up to the door—her grandpa was just coming back with his coat half on. Reagan hurried past him into the house and closed the door behind her.

  And then there they were, she and her grandpa, standing not a foot apart. His coat was still hanging from one shoulder, and Reagan had tracked snow onto the carpet, and all she could think about in that moment was the air between them—the constant flow of droplets and microparticles. Her grandpa looked thinner than she remembered. Older than he’d looked just a few months ago. Like she could knock him over by breathing too hard.

  This is okay. She’d taken every precaution. Reagan had been careful, anyway, for months—and then she’d practically sealed her little house off for two weeks so she could be here. She hadn’t even opened her mail.

  She was as clean as she could be; she wasn’t going to hurt him.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” she said. And then she dropped her bags and stepped forward to give him a hug. It took him a second to catch up. Reagan didn’t blame him; she hadn’t hugged anyone in months, and neither of them had ever been huggers anyway. Grandma was the hugger. Grandma was the one who made you go find your grandpa and give him a hug. Reagan and her grandfather had probably never hugged before except under orders.

  Reagan was the wrong choice for this.

  If you could only spend Christmas with one person, no one in her family would pick her. (No one in the world would pick her.)

  Reagan was the person you called when you wanted someone to talk you into leaving your husband. Or when you needed someone to call the bank to straighten out your overdraft fees.

  Her niece called Reagan when she needed help getting birth control. And Reagan’s mom called when she wanted someone to go to the Ford dealership with her dad, so they didn’t end up paying too much for a truck.

  No one called Reagan for comfort.

  No one called Reagan to offer any.

  No one ever said, “I’m lonely, could you come by?”—and no one ever came by.

  Even before this bullshit.

  Her grandpa felt more solid in her arms than he looked. He was a big guy once, and those bones were still there. “Thought maybe my hugging days were over,” he said.

  Reagan laughed and pulled away. “Me, too. It smells good in here.”

  “You thought I couldn’t make a turkey?”

  “No, I believed in you.”

  “I didn’t bother with the potatoes.”

  “I brought potatoes,” she said. “I told you I would.”

  “Well, all right . . .” He seemed awkward. Standing there in his own living room. Everything looked the same as it had when her grandma was alive. Either he kept the place pretty clean, or he’d cleaned up because Reagan was coming over.

  “Well, all right,” she said. “Let’s get them started.”

  Grandpa turned toward the kitchen. Then the doorbell rang, and he turned back. Reagan caught his arm. “Don’t answer that,” she scolded. “You don’t answer the door, do you?”

  “Well, I look to see who it is. I get a lot of deliveries.”

  “I’ll check. There’s no reason for you to be answering the door right now. Nobody needs you.”

  She looked out the window. She didn’t see anyone. Who was making deliveries on Christmas Day? Fucking Amazon Prime.

  Reagan opened the door. The Jell-O salad was sitting on the welcome mat.

  She picked it up, then went inside and wiped the glass down with a Clorox wipe.

  Her mom texted while Reagan was peeling potatoes.

  I’ve been thinking and I just think it would be okay if you brought Grandpa over for dinner.

  You always think it would be okay, Reagan texted back.

  Well it has been so far!

  Her older sister, Caitlin, was on the thread, too.

  I mean, Caitlin texted, Mom’s right. We haven’t seen each other in nine months, and none of us have had Covid. So that’s nine months w
e could have seen each other.

  Reagan wanted to say, “Maybe that’s why we haven’t had Covid.”

  But she wasn’t even sure that no one in her family had had Covid. They wouldn’t tell her if they had. Half of them didn’t wear masks—half of Nebraska wouldn’t wear a mask. Her brother kept posting conspiracy theories on Facebook, and Reagan was the only one arguing with him.

  Also, Reagan’s family had seen each other. The rest of them had. They’d all gotten together for Thanksgiving. “We’re socially distanced over here,” her mom had called to tell her.

  “You put the leaf in the dining room table,” Reagan replied. “That’s not social distancing.”

  Only Reagan and her grandpa were taking this seriously. They each spent Thanksgiving alone—Grandpa here in Arnold, the little town where most of her family still lived, and Reagan a few hours away, in Lincoln.

  “We’re all so worried about you,” her mom kept saying to her. “You’re becoming a recluse.”

  “I’m simply following the recommendations of the CDC,” Reagan would say.

  “Oh, the CDC . . .”

  Reagan didn’t need to get Covid. She was fat and prone to bronchitis. She was exactly the sort of person who showed up in those “Who we’ve lost” retrospectives in the local newspaper.

  If you asked Reagan, every single person in her family looked like someone in a Covid obituary. They were all fat. Her dad was diabetic. Her mom was a cancer survivor. Her sister still smoked. What were they playing at? They weren’t lucky people. They were the sort of people who got laid off right before Christmas and got pregnant in the back seat of cars. Why were they willing to roll these dice?

  Her grandpa had locked down right away.

  “I’m worried about your grandpa,” her mom said back in April. “He won’t let me come over.”

  Good, Reagan had thought.

  “He’s still grieving,” her mom said. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

  Reagan couldn’t really argue with that. There was no good argument. There was no answer. No good way to deal with any of this.

  She’d called Grandpa on Thanksgiving Day and cooked up a plan for Christmas. She’d had to convince him it would be safe.

  “I’ll stay home for two weeks, Grandpa. I’ll be totally quarantined.”

  “Well, I don’t know that I want you to do that for me, Reagan . . .”

  “I want to do it.”

  “That’s a long time for a young person to stay home.”

  “I’d be home anyway, Grandpa.” Reagan hadn’t seen friends since March. She hadn’t been on a single date.

  “Well, I don’t know . . .”

  “I’m coming,” she’d said. “We’re going to have Christmas together.”

  Reagan didn’t know how to make mashed potatoes. (Single people didn’t make mashed potatoes.) But she’d looked up directions online, and it didn’t seem hard.

  Her grandpa made the gravy.

  He’d already set the table with her grandma’s red poinsettia tablecloth and gotten out two of the good plates, the not-quite-china with the purple flowers around the edges.

  Reagan had never seen this table so empty.

  Normally it was so crowded with food there was no room for your dinner plate. And no room for anyone under forty, anyway. Reagan had spent every Christmas of her life sitting at one of the card tables set up in the living room. The kids’ tables.

  This wasn’t how she wanted to move up.

  God, even if this were a normal Christmas, the only reason there’d be more room at the big table was because Grandma was gone. Would they even have Christmas here anymore? Or would Reagan’s parents take over? Would their extended family split into smaller units, all the aunts and uncles doing their own thing? They were all grandparents now. All matriarchs and patriarchs. Who would get custody of Grandpa on Christmas—would it rotate? Maybe Reagan wouldn’t see her cousins again until the next funeral. The next Zoom funeral.

  Motherfuck, this was a bleak line of thinking. This was a bleak time to be alive. And this was definitely a bleak motherfucking table.

  She set out the potatoes, the gravy boat, the lasagna pan full of green Jell-O salad, the dinner rolls Grandpa made from a can . . .

  Grandpa brought out the turkey. Reagan laughed when she saw it.

  “Why are you laughing at my turkey?”

  “Because it’s massive.”

  He set it down. “It’s eighteen pounds.”

  “That’s huge, Grandpa.”

  “I only know how to make an eighteen-pound turkey. I didn’t feel like experimenting.”

  “I guess you’ll have leftovers for sandwiches,” she said.

  “You can take some of it with you.”

  She nodded.

  Grandpa sat at the head of the table, and Reagan sat next to him. He started carving the turkey with an electric knife that was probably older than she was. “It’s your lucky day,” he said. “You don’t have to fight anybody for a drumstick.”

  She laughed. She was glad for his dumb jokes. They’d already run out of things to talk about in the kitchen. There wasn’t much. He was a retired rancher who watched a lot of television. She was an accountant who worked from home. They talked about Covid news and theories. They’d read all the same newspaper stories. Her grandpa watched cable news but didn’t trust it. Reagan had never really had a conversation with her grandfather before. They’d always been part of a larger group—always with her grandmother, usually with her parents. They didn’t really have an existing dynamic. So they talked about the things that had brought them together today: Their worry. Their caution. Their firm belief that most people were idiots.

  That was a nice discovery, that her grandpa seemed to dislike people as much as she did. Had he always been that way? Or was he just getting crotchety in old age and loneliness? Reagan had always been that way, and it was only getting worse.

  “Your grandmother would want us to say grace,” he said, after they’d piled up their plates.

  “Hmm.” Reagan was noncommittal. She’d already taken a bite of turkey.

  “But if she wanted me to keep saying grace,” he went on, “she should have outlived me.”

  The turkey caught in Reagan’s throat. She looked up at him, to see if he was being bitter or morose—but he just looked matter-of-fact. He was buttering his roll.

  Reagan finished swallowing. “She really should have.”

  He set the roll on his plate. “I kept telling her . . . that if she wanted me to get into heaven, she’d have to deliver me herself.”

  Reagan laughed. There were tears in her eyes. “That woman had no follow-through.”

  Her grandpa looked up at her. His eyes were shining, too. “Exactly.”

  “Do you think Grandma would have been as careful as you? Through all this?”

  “Heck no, I would have had to nail our windows closed.”

  Reagan’s grandmother had been a short, wide woman who dyed her hair red and always wore pink lipstick. She was active in her church, active in the community. The type of person who went to all of her grandkids’ recitals and school plays, even after she had twenty of them.

  She framed every school photo the grandkids ever gave her, always leaving the old ones inside so that the pictures stacked up and made the backs hard to close. Reagan’s senior picture was sitting on a coffee table in the living room, and if you opened it up, her whole childhood would spring out.

  “I can’t even imagine your grandmother wearing a mask,” Grandpa said.

  “Maybe she’d get into it,” Reagan said. “It would have given her something to do with her old quilting scraps.”

  “Those homemade masks aren’t good for anything . . .”

  “Better than nothing,” she said.

  “I’ve got some N95s for when I work with insulation. Remind me to give you a couple when you leave.”

  “All right.” The potatoes were sticky, but the gravy was good. Reagan’s whole plate was
brown and white. The only green thing was her dish of Jell-O—she should have brought a vegetable. “My mom hates wearing a mask because she says they smear her lipstick. So then I say, ‘Don’t wear lipstick,’ and she acts like I said, ‘Don’t wear pants.’”

  Her grandpa laughed. But it turned sharp at the end. “I wish she’d be more careful.”

  “Me, too,” Reagan said.

  “To be honest, sometimes I’m glad your grandma didn’t have to live through this. I think about it sometimes, that she never heard about it. She never worried about it. She never lost anyone to it. She left before she ever had to take on this burden. And I’m glad for that.”

  Reagan nodded.

  She couldn’t really think of anything to say after that. And her grandpa didn’t seem to want to talk more, either. And there was no one to make them be sociable.

  Reagan had quit smoking a long time ago. After college. Smoking used to make her feel like such a badass. But then she got out of school and started working—and smoking just made her feel hard. Even the way she held the cigarette in her hand and in her mouth . . . It was like she was always smirking. Always making a face like, “Well, isn’t that fucking perfect.”

  Reagan already felt hard enough. She didn’t need any accessories. She didn’t need to telegraph it out to the world.

  Also she kept getting bronchitis. It was a fucking drag, so she quit.

  But she still missed cigarettes. She missed having the excuse of them. The “Be right back”s. She missed the way decent people would leave you alone as soon as you pulled out the pack.

  She still took cigarette breaks sometimes.

  After dinner, she and her grandpa moved into the living room to watch television. Reagan didn’t want to watch Fox News, so they settled on the Weather Channel. He sat in his easy chair, and Reagan sat on the couch, fiddling with a crochet hook she’d found tucked between the cushions.

  After a half hour, she said, “I’m going to get some air.”

  Her grandpa nodded.

  She put on her coat and headed out onto the back deck. It was too cold for the snow to melt, but it wasn’t freezing—or it was just barely freezing.

  “Hey,” someone said.

  Reagan jumped.

  It was Mason again, standing on his parents’ deck. “I swear to God,” he said. “I’m not trying to startle you.”