The deal was that we would only be spending two nights in Massachusetts. That way, I got to spend a full week alone with Dad and Grampa before heading down to my mom's on the 24th. It was a great time, the driveway was snowed in so we had to shovel most days, and I made hot cocoa and sugar cookies for when Dad got home from work in the afternoons. I even helped Grampa to start cleaning out his attic, something he had been meaning to do for years, and went snowshoeing with my high school friend Bethany who was home from college as well.

But no matter what all I did to keep myself occupied, the 24th eventually came and we packed up Grampa's newish silver SUV before heading south to Central Massachusetts. With immense relief, we thanked the heavens for the clear roads and that we didn't have to drive through Boston. The holiday traffic was bad enough on our route.

My mom and Michael and Elsie met us on the porch when the car pulled up in their driveway. They looked like the people on home décor ads: Michael with his perfectly bourgeois salt-and-pepper comb-over hair and crisp white shirt underneath a blue knit sweater, Mom with a country club loose perm and tan pants and a gray knit sweater, and Elsie with her long, blond hair in a French braid and wearing cute new-looking ankle boots. The whole family looked like they had sprung from a Town & Country catalog dedicated to owners of white picket fences. Believing I had once belonged to that same family (or at least two thirds of it) was difficult to wrap my head around.

I bet Elsie loved her new boots and wore them around the house. Perks of being in a wheelchair, she would say. She had grown so much. I could hardly believe she was turning 16 in January. But then, I could hardly believe I was 20 already.

The welcome was warm, and Mom and Dad seemed fine around each other, as did Michael and Dad. Grampa and Michael had never met, but they, too, seemed to get along fine. I was suspicious of the shiny happy family front, but I would have to play along if this holiday was going to be bearable. Phoniness may have been a pet peeve of mine, but outright confrontation was off the table.

That afternoon, I was on cookie-baking duty with Elsie, who had volunteered the both of us for gingersnaps, while Mom went grocery shopping, Michael stopped by his parents' place nearby, and Dad and Grampa drove into town to look around. I had wanted to go with them, but had been gone so fast. Not that I didn't like baking, not that it wasn't nice to spend some time with my sister, but I would have rather spent more time with my core family.

***

Elsie was excited to bake with me, and even though it was Christmas, I insisted on doing Grammy's oatmeal raisin cookies in addition to the gingersnaps.

"I don't get why you like those so much when you could use chocolate chips instead of the raisins." Elsie's voice was so eerily mean-girl-like that I had to remind myself she was my sister and not a stranger.

"It's not only the taste. They remind me of Grammy. I baked with her a lot."

"My hand-stitched throw pillow reminds me of Grammy, or Mom's ugly black loafers remind me of Grammy." I smirked despite myself. Elsie shrugged one shoulder sassily, then reminded me: "Don't put too much flour in there, the dough isn't supposed to be too thick."

"The recipe is right here and I'm following it, Ma'am." Where does she get this tone? As if I had never made gingersnaps before. I supposed she had always had the tendency, but I had forgotten about it.

Side by side we worked on the doughs for a while. The silent agreement we had come to after her reprimand was that I would do my oatmeal raisin cookies while the princess would graciously accept the burden of preparing the gingersnaps for the good of all of us.

Elsie's playlist had finished, now the only sounds audible were ingredient containers opening and closing, the low humming of the fridge, and some of the mysterious creaks houses made. The silence was a welcome change from the non-stop acoustic pollution through Christmas pop.

"How's college this year? Have you made any new friends?"

I hadn't thought of it until now, but this year had been a good one in that regard. There were the pregamers like Greg and Aidan and then a few other soccer guys who greeted me on campus. Importantly, I had Linh, maybe I still had Devin. And John. Before I had fallen for him. And now I found myself slowly working my way back up after that fall.

"Yeah."

"Anyone interesting?" she probed.

"If I didn't think they were interesting, do you think I'd count them as my friends?"

"You know what I mean." A wicked grin spread across Elsie's face as she formed the last cookie to fit on the round metal sheet, then pushed the whole tray into the oven. "A friend who is a boy?"

Two could play this game. "Sure, I have friends who aren't girls."

"Ugh, Gracie, you're obnoxious." Ha, look who's talking. "A boyfriend?"

I sighed, signaling my surrender. "Um... yeah, kind of."

"'Kind of'?" she echoed.

"Yes, I do."

"Uh-huh. What's his name? What's he like? What's his major? Is he a mysterious foreign exchange student who speaks English with a hot European accent or whatever?"

It took great effort to bite my tongue so I wouldn't ask her if she thought Europe was a country and that all of Europe spoke the same language (European?). But that didn't change the fact that I wasn't sure what to say. I had mentioned Liam to Dad and had mentioned him a few more times to Grampa, but had never explicitly called him my boyfriend or otherwise made known how big of a part of my college life he had become. I would bring him into my other life eventually, and perhaps even into the other part of the family at a later point. Regardless, Elsie would not be letting me off the hook.

"His name is Liam, he's majoring in International Politics and Economics, and he's a not-so-mysterious New Jerseyan. And that's all you're going to get out of me, so let's give these cookies a go."

She demanded, then begged me to show her a photo, but I just pushed past her, placing my sheet of raisin cookies in the oven alongside her ginger snaps, and set the timer on my phone.

The front door opened and slammed shut and a few seconds later, Mom entered the kitchen, set down the paper grocery bags, and asked what cookies we were making. Elsie told her: "Grace is making oatmeal raisin, but we're also making good ones."

I made a face at Elsie's back and Mom saw.

"You used to make these with Grammy, didn't you?" she asked.

"Yeah." The hint of a smile crept up on my lips and I nodded.

"Elsie, you may not remember, but your Grammy's recipe won actual prizes at community baking contests. All this time, she only had it in her head. Not on a piece of paper, not in a cookbook, nowhere. The world is lucky Grace asked her for it when Grammy was still around. So try them before you judge, okay?"

It was true. Grammy had had a couple of killer recipes back in the day. Most of them, like the pumpkin pie I had made for Thanksgiving, were either printed on the worn pages of her copy of The Housewife's Guide to Baking—yikes for the title, but the content was unbeatable—or jotted down in her barely legible ornate handwriting on loose adhesive notes she had stuck onto almost every page of the book. But a few of the best recipes she had kept stored in her memory after having lost the respective sticky note at some point.

I hadn't thought Mom knew that I had transcribed her mother-in-law's recipes; they had already been moved out for over a year when Grammy's health had begun to deteriorate, and it had done so fairly fast. Her breast cancer had been diagnosed so late that her body had not responded to the treatment anymore and within months, my family had gone from having a loving grandmother, mother, and wife to missing all of those.

It had been a difficult time back then, for Grampa, obviously, and for Dad, of course, but also for me. With Grammy dying after Mom and Elsie's move, I had lost three family members within the span of 14 months, among them my closest confidante, Grams. On the day of her funeral, Grampa gave me The Housewife's Guide to Baking and I had been guarding it like the apple of my eye ever since. In a way, those oatmeal raisin cookies were the closest I'd get to Grammy ever again.

"Hey ladies, is everything alright in here? What are you up to?" Michael entered the kitchen and walked toward the fridge to get a glass of cold water. On the way, he brushed Mom's arm affectionately.

He had taken off his expensive-looking sweater and was now only in his stiff white button-down shirt. With his height, his graying hair, and unoriginal dress style, he looked like a million other middle-aged White American middle-class men, and he looked like he embraced it.

He probably played squash in his free time and talked to his dentist friends about how he wanted to provide a comfortable life for his quasi-wife and quasi-step-daughter and showed up to every talent show and science fair Elsie had at school. He probably hosted barbecues in the summer and told Elsie's friends embarrassing dad jokes while cracking up himself. Toying with the idea of leasing a new car, he probably visited the local dealership every so let to have the owner, who was also a patient of his, show him the newest models and tell him all about how impressed his family would be at this model Chevy or that model Buick.

I disdained the lifestyle for which Michael stood, and yet, I envied this simple-minded, neatly groomed life with a neatly groomed house and yard, a neatly groomed family, and neatly groomed connections in the area. Places like these, or the Jays' house in Westchester, seemed to have gotten stuck in 50s post-war affluence, only everyone was sooo much more liberal now.

But Michael was a genuinely nice and caring partnerand stepdad, even host, I had to admit. And maybe, just maybe, Christmas thisyear wouldn't suck as badly as I had expected.