On Christmas morning, before the small pile, Tom stood at the window in white socks and watched the snow take the porch rail.
He thought of his own father, who had worked days and still missed things, and of how he had sworn he would miss less and had instead missed differently. He thought of the gold band in the bathroom dish when he washed his hands at the plant and of putting it back on every time as if the putting-back were a vow you could renew with water. He thought of Cody at two, falling asleep on his chest during a football game that still had sound. He thought, I can still be that chest. The thought was sincere. Sincere thoughts are not armor.
Laura hung the stockings at six-thirty with coffee cooling beside her. Tom, Laura, Cody. The letters on Cody’s had begun to peel two years ago and she had not fixed them. She touched the peel and left it. Some repairs announce themselves as repairs. She did not want the mantel to look newly virtuous. She wanted it to look like last year and the year before, as if continuity could be an alibi.
Cody woke loud, which was his gift. He did not sneak. He arrived. He stood in the living room in the gray hoodie he had slept in and said the tree looked bigger. Tom said the tree had not grown. Cody said it had grown in spirit. Laura, despite everything, loved him so hard in that second that her eyes stung. Love for a child can sit right beside a wreck and not cancel it. It only makes the wreck more expensive.
They ate cinnamon rolls from a tube because Laura had not had it in her to make dough. Tom called them homemade anyway. Cody licked icing off his thumb and asked if Uncle Ben liked cinnamon rolls. The name in the morning kitchen made Laura’s fork stop. Tom said, “Ben’ll eat anything that sits still,” the easy old friendship sentence, and went back to the roll. Cody said, “He likes the kind with raisins even though raisins are a scam.” Tom laughed. Laura did not. She got up for juice she did not want.
After the small gifts Tom built the fire too high and then tamed it. He was better with fire than with timing. He sat on the carpet and pulled Cody against his side and they watched the muted game for a while as if the game were the point. Laura photographed them once, then looked at the photograph and saw a family she was in the process of breaking and had already broken, which is a distinction without comfort. She deleted the photo. She did not know why. Deleting it did not delete the room.
At two o’clock the snow thickened. The porch light, still on, became a small sun in the gray. Tom said, “That’s the stuff,” meaning the snow, meaning the day, meaning the feeling he had paid for with a year of fluorescent nights. He squeezed Laura’s knee through the jeans. She put her hand over his so he would not take the squeeze away and so he would not take it further. Cody asked if it was last-present time. Tom looked at the fire and said almost. Almost is a father’s favorite delay when the delay is pleasure.
Laura went down the hall and stood in Cody’s room and looked at the T-shirt over the other console and almost moved it to the closet. Moving it would have been a confession in objects. Leaving it was a confession in neglect. She left it. She stood in the doorway and whispered, “Please don’t,” to a boy who was not in the room to hear her and to a god she had not spoken to seriously since Easter. Please don’t compare them. Please don’t be helpful. Please let the box be only a box.
When she came back Tom was already on his feet. The garage door of his plan had opened. She sat down because her legs had made the decision before her pride.
Ben, two subdivisions over, spent Christmas morning in the too-big house with a pot of coffee and a television that had sound. He did not text. He had been told not to. Obedience gave him a feeling like virtue. He opened a present he had bought himself, a jacket he did not need, and thought of a beige carpet and a boy with dirty-blond hair and a woman in a cream sweater who had said after the holidays as if after were a town you could drive to. He was not a monster in his own mind either. Few people are. He was a lonely man who had been allowed into a schedule and had stayed. The staying was the crime. The staying would not walk into the Brennan living room that night. Only his name would. A name is enough when a child is the messenger.