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Day Thirteen: eating ice cream
Timeline:just married
Gibbs ran his hand along his jaw roughly as he left the small bedroom down the hall from the brownstone's spacious master. He sensed, from her increasingly aggressive snaps and her caustic language, that Jenny wanted to be alone - even though in the beginning, she'd indifferently said she wanted help.
He should have known - and she should have been aware enough of her own feelings to know - that cleaning out her old brown stone for the move to his house, and to put it on the market, would bring up a lot of old memories - and her son's room, especially, was going to be hard.
He'd spent the past half hour awkwardly going through things; he'd pick up boxes only to have them snatched away; he'd open a drawer just to have her tell him she'd take that one, he needed to back off, etc. He was quietly trying to stay out of her way and help at the same time, but in the end she was the only one who knew what she wanted to get rid of and what she didn't, so he decided to go clean out the kitchen.
He began by unplugging the refrigerator and pulling up the trash can to throw everything away. It was easy - they weren't saving anything. He just grabbed and chucked, without even thinking about it - which meant he could think more about Jenny. He was worrying about her upstairs, thinking he should check on her in a minute, when he opened the freezer and found himself staring at - well, basically a freezer full of Neapolitan ice cream.
God, he hadn't seen Neapolitan ice cream since - since Kelly was a kid. She had loved that stuff - liked to mix it all into one flavorful colour sometimes, or maybe meticulously eat one flavor, then another, trying not to mix them. He pulled one carton out of the fridge and looked at it - it was the one closest, and it was half empty.
"Jen?" he yelled.
He waited, and figured she was ignoring him, but then he heard:
"Yeah?"
"Hell of a lot of ice cream to waste," he ventured loudly, stepping towards the hall. He walked to the base of the stairs, the carton in his hands. "You want me to toss all this?"
He was about to start up the stairs when she appeared at the top, pausing at the railing. She seemed conflicted, and then she straightened up, and looked like she was baffled with her own behavior.
"You can," she said flippantly, and then cocked her head. "You - can I buy some for your freezer?"
He gave her a funny look.
"Well, yeah, Jen," he said, shrugging. "You're - we got married," he pointed out. "Our fridge. Buy what you want," he said, shrugging again.
She leaned over the railing, looking down at him. He put up with her silence for a minute.
"You okay up there?" he asked finally, gesturing with the ice cream carton. "You uh," he paused, "want me to go out for pizza, leave you alone?"
She shrugged. She didn't answer. She looked over her shoulder towards the room, and then ran her hand back through her hair. She faced him, and nodded at the ice cream.
"It was Peter's favorite," she said quietly.
She disappeared back into the bedroom, and Gibbs looked down at his hands. He didn't know why there were so many cartons - and he'd never noticed if there were before, but then, he'd opened her freezer maybe once or twice in the time since he'd met her.
He went into the kitchen, about to start tossing them. Then he had change of heart, and grabbed two bowls. He spooned a psychedelic amount of each ice cream into two bowls, grabbed spoons, and slowly went back upstairs to join her. She was sitting on the floor in a barren room - -the only indication it had ever been a child's room were the contents of the boxes on the floor - and she half-heartedly flipped through a colouring book.
He sat down behind her, stretched his legs out around her, and handed her a bowl. She seemed surprised, so he rested it on her knee until she took it, letting the book fall into her lap. He looked down over her shoulder. It was a messily filled in cartoon from an old children's show - no, the movie Toy Story. On the bottom of the page, someone had written: To Mommy.
Jenny took the bowl from him.
"Neapolitan isn't vogue," she remarked hoarsely. "I got in the habit of buying it for him whenever I saw it. I ... never stopped," she hesitated. "I usually eat a carton a month. I stopped ... doing it when I met you," she remarked, her brow furrowing. "But the cartons piled up."
He thought maybe that was half a good sign - she couldn't shake the habit of buying it, but she hadn't spent so much time dwelling heavily with tears and food.
He wrapped one arm around her tightly and pulled her back against him.
She pointed to the colouring book.
"Jim wrote this," she muttered.
Gibbs pressed his lips to her neck. She fell silent, looking around, and then she grabbed her spoon and put a little bit of chocolate, a little bit of strawberry, and a little bit of vanilla on her spoon and tasted it thoughtfully. She sucked on the spoon for a moment, then placed it gingerly back into the bowl. She closed her eyes and leaned back against him.
"This is so hard," she whispered. Her voice cracked. "I miss him so much, Jethro."
-alexandra