Cody said thank you. He ran his hands over the box as if the cardboard were already the game. He said, “Dad’s gonna think this is so cool.”
Laura said, “Dad’s tired when he gets home. We’ll tell him this weekend.”
They did not tell him that weekend. They did not tell him the next one. The console went into Cody’s room and became the sound behind a closed door. Tom, on his nights off, heard the sound and assumed it was the old system, the one they had bought used two years ago. He was too glad to be on the carpet to inventory the electronics. Laura counted on that gladness. Ben counted on it too. Counting on a tired man’s inattention is not love. It is strategy. By December it had worked long enough to feel like a plan.
The Switch 2 was Tom’s idea, which made the symmetry cruel.
He had seen the listing in November on a break, standing under a fluorescent light that made everything look cheaper than it was. He thought of Cody’s hands. He thought of being the man who walked in with the box the boy would remember. He skipped lunches. He moved a dentist appointment. He told Laura not to buy the big thing, that he had the big thing. Laura went quiet on the phone in a way he mistook for surprise.
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“I want to. I missed Halloween. I missed the concert. I’m not missing Christmas morning.”
He was not, technically, missing Christmas morning. He was missing a year of evenings, and he was trying to buy the missing back in one sealed rectangle of white and red cardboard. Plenty of American fathers have tried that purchase. Some of them get away with it. Tom was not going to get away with it, but he did not know that when he hid the box in the garage behind the bag of ice melt.
Laura knew. She knew the moment he said Nintendo that the living room would eventually contain two stories about two boxes, and that a nine-year-old would not keep those stories in separate drawers. Children are honest because they have not yet learned which honesty will burn the house. She told herself she would handle it. Handling it, in her mind, meant steering Cody away from comparisons. It did not occur to her, not with enough force, that the comparison would arrive as gratitude.
Christmas Eve they did the smaller gifts. Socks. A book. A puzzle Laura had chosen because puzzles look like virtue. Cody went to bed talking about tomorrow as if tomorrow were a person. Tom sat on the edge of the bed in the forest-green quarter-zip he would still be wearing twenty-four hours later and said, “Wait until you see what’s left.”