Err on the Side of Violence: Terribly Acronymed Detective Club Series (Book 3)

Chapter Eighteen: Joe, Winter, 1980

Lauren kissed Joe on the lips on Christmas Day, and it was the best Christmas present he'd ever gotten.

Up until that point it had been a rather subdued Christmas. It was the first one without Al and his family knocking on their door to wish them a Merry Christmas. 

Al's dad might have been an antisocial man, who hadn't even come to their ten year dinner (it had hurt Joe's dad, even though Joe had assured Al that he wouldn't even notice,) but Al's mom dragged him out one day a year to say hello to the neighbours, and that was Christmas Day. 

Part of the charm of the visit was seeing how Al's dad squirmed like he was wearing clothes two sizes too small while they chatted on the doorstep. Al's mom would hand them a box of chocolates and Joe's mom would give them a panettone, the Italian sweet bread with candied fruit that was always popular at Christmas time. They would never come inside, claiming they had other doors to knock on, but Joe knew it was because Al's dad wouldn't set foot in any home that wasn't his own. For a psychologist, the man had issues that certainly could have benefited from the attentions of one. 

Since they'd moved away, they'd come to visit a couple of times, but it had only been a few weeks since their last visit, and Joe suspected they wouldn't come all the way down from Coquitlam to visit for Christmas. Not because of snow; it was eleven degrees Celsius and raining, balmy for this area in the winter. Joe noticed that a month had separated the first visit from the move, and then a month and a half had separated the second visit from the first; the next visit would probably be at least two months from the second, and Christmas day was a bit early. 

Joe hadn't known how much he'd wanted to see Al until he knew their family wouldn't be knocking on their door. He liked Al well enough, he was part of the group that had been together since they were five, when Joe, Rachel and Sunny had been introduced to the small boy clinging to his mom's pant leg and sucking his thumb. He'd never considered Al integral to the group, though, and this was something he would never admit to the others, especially Rachel, who was the hub around which the rest of them turned, and who had a soft spot for Al. Maybe it was his fearfulness, his unwillingness to push boundaries, that grated on Joe, even though he also considered himself a rule follower, except for him it wasn't out of fear of the consequences for breaking them, but respect for the grown-ups who made them. Maybe Joe had seen his own inverse when he'd looked at Al, and he hadn't liked it. Whatever the reason, though he'd never wish any of them move away, he'd been secretly relieved Al was the first, because he thought he could let him go without too much disruption to his life. 

The little guy had meant more to him than he realized, though, because his absence this Christmas felt like a hole in his heart. 

Rachel missed him a lot, he knew, because she often talked about the phone calls she had with him as if they were the highlight of her day. The fact that Al didn't call him as often as he did Rachel, or even Sunny or Lauren for that matter, also stung; maybe Al felt as ambiguous about Joe as Joe felt about him.

"He called me today and wished me a Merry Christmas," Rachel said when Joe and his family visited them, bringing them not just the usual panettone but gifts for her and for her father. It had been a tradition of theirs to do this ever since Rachel's mom had moved away, but they didn't include Rachel's mom in the gift giving now that she was back; for some reason, Joe's dad didn't like Rachel's mom. He supposed his dad didn't approve of mothers leaving their children and returning eight years later. He was traditional about families, and a mother's love for her children, in his mind, was supposed to be as sure as the sunrise (he only found out years later that the real reason his dad didn't like Rachel's mom was because he suspected she'd called the tax man on their little bean selling operation and cost him hundreds of dollars in back taxes for the unclaimed revenue.)