Snow had started before dawn and kept going, not a storm, a steadiness. The porch light stayed on because Tom forgot it and because Laura did not remind him. Forgetting a porch light is the sort of small domestic failure that used to be a joke between them. This year it was only a fact. The living room collected the morning in pieces: coffee, a cartoon Cody was too old for and not yet willing to surrender, the fire Tom built with too much newspaper, the tree looking fuller in daylight than it had any right to look.
They opened the smaller pile first because Tom wanted the last box to have a stage. Cody got a hoodie he already almost had. Laura got the gold hoops she was wearing by afternoon, which Tom had bought in October and hidden in a boot. She put them on immediately and kissed his cheek and the kiss was real enough to confuse her. Tom got socks and a gift card and pretended both were exactly what he wanted, because that is a father’s job on a morning when he is waiting to be the hero of a larger cardboard moment.
By late afternoon the football replay was on, muted, because Tom liked the movement of a game without the noise of one. Laura picked wrapping paper off the beige carpet and then stopped picking, because a little mess made the room look used and she needed the room to look used, not staged. Cody lay on his stomach near the tree and rolled a leftover ornament between his palms. The stockings on the mantel hung slightly crooked. Laura did not straighten them. She had straightened enough things this year that would not stay straight.
Tom went to the garage on the pretense of checking the ice melt and came back with the Switch 2 box held a little out from his body, like a man carrying a cake. Laura saw it and felt her throat close half an inch. She smiled anyway. The smile was the smile from photographs. Cody sat up so fast the ornament rolled under the sofa.
“Is that—”
“Don’t guess,” Tom said, already grinning, already younger in the face. “Come here.”
They ended up on the carpet because that was where the family still knew how to be a family. Tree to their left, slightly out of the first view if you were standing in the hall. Fire at their backs. Television murmuring light without sound. Snow at the window. Three people in one living room, geographically where they had always been on this holiday, which is to say close enough to touch and not close enough to see through.
Laura tucked one leg under herself. She had the sudden, useless thought that she should take the box out of Tom’s hands and invent a reason — a receipt, a missing game, a store hours problem — anything to keep Cody from opening his mouth in the direction of comparison. She did not move. Interrupting a father’s Christmas would have required a courage she had spent on quieter doors.
Tom held the box out.
Cody took it with both hands.