She was standing in the garage looking at his hidden box again. She had not meant to. She had gone for tape. The Nintendo colors were louder in the cold. She touched the cardboard with two fingers as if the box might explain how to get through a morning. It did not. She took the tape and left the box where it was and went inside and wrapped the puzzle that looked like virtue.
Cody, that week, made a list that was not a list so much as a speech he would later give without knowing it was a speech. He told his teacher that Christmas at his house had extra people sometimes. The teacher, who had twenty-six other children and a limited amount of alarm, smiled and said that sounded festive. He told Jake that Uncle Ben gave better presents than Santa because Santa didn’t know about the new system. Jake said Santa knew everything. Cody said Santa had never been to his house when Dad worked. The theology of nine is practical. Presence is the proof.
On the twenty-third Tom bought batteries and a second extension cord he did not need. He walked the holiday-store aisle and saw other fathers doing the same small last-mile work and felt, briefly, among his kind. A man with a cart nodded at the batteries as if batteries were a handshake. Tom nodded back. He did not know the man’s name. He did not need to. They were both trying to arrive at the same hour with the same sufficiency.
Home that night Laura had put on the cream sweater a day early, then taken it off, then left it on a chair like a decision. Tom noticed the sweater and not the restlessness. He said she looked nice. She said it was just a sweater. He said just a sweater was doing a lot. She almost told him everything then, standing in the living room with the tree already lit and the football already muted and the three stockings already hung. The sentence formed. I have to tell you about Ben. It reached her teeth. Cody ran through with a candy cane and asked who ate the last chocolate from the cheap calendar. The sentence sat down. Tom said he had eaten the chocolate and Cody accused him of crimes against Advent. They laughed. Laura laughed too. The laugh used the last of the evening’s courage.
She slept that night with her back to Tom and her eyes open at the wall. He slept the heavy sleep of a man who believes the next two days are the repair. In the dark she whispered, “I’m sorry,” so quietly it did not qualify as waking him and did not qualify as confession. The porch light, still on, made a faint rectangle on the ceiling. Snow was not yet falling. It would be, soon enough. The weather would do what the weather does. The living room would do the rest.
They had married in a church that smelled like lemon oil and old hymnals, which is to say they had married like a great many people in towns like theirs. Tom was twenty-five. Laura was twenty-three. He had a full head of brown hair and no gray at the temples and a job that ended at five. She had shorter hair then and a laugh that made his friends look at him with a respect he had not earned by any other means. The gold bands were new and too shiny. Someone’s uncle drank too much at the reception and said they would last because they looked like they liked each other. It was a drunken sentence and it was also, for a long time, accurate.
The first apartment had a window that faced an alley and a radiator that performed. They ate on the floor. They fought about nothing that would later matter and made up in the way young people make up, as if time were a renewable resource. When Cody came, the apartment became impossible in a single week. They found the house on a street with a name that sounded like a promise — Maple something, or Sycamore, the kind of name developers use when they want a tree without waiting for one. Tom painted the nursery twice because the first green looked sick. Laura sat on the beige carpet that was new then and cried because she was happy and because she was terrified, which is a combination a lot of new mothers do not get credit for.
For years the marriage was a working machine. Not a poem. A machine. Paychecks. Pediatrician visits. A grill on the patio. Church at Christmas and Easter and whenever someone’s parent was visiting. They were not bored. They were busy, which can disguise bored until the busyness stops. When the plant offered Tom the night lead, the machine made a sound neither of them wanted to identify. Laura said yes because the roof had a soft place and because saying no would have required a different plan they did not have. Tom said thank you as if she had given him permission to save them. Permission is not the same thing as a map for the hours after she said it.
The first month of nights he called her at ten and again at one if the line was quiet. She answered. They talked about Cody’s spelling test and a leak in the bathroom and whether they should get a dog, which they should not. By the third month the ten o’clock call became a text. By the fifth month the text became Good night, with no question mark. Absence trains a house the way weather trains a field. Things grow that no one planted.
Ben’s divorce had been final in the winter before the night shift. Tom had helped him move a couch. Laura had brought a lasagna that was, in hindsight, a motif. Ben stood in his too-big kitchen and said, “Don’t let this happen to you two,” and Tom had clapped him on the shoulder and said they were fine. Laura had looked at the empty second set of hooks in Ben’s hall and felt a draft that was not about Ben. She should have taken the draft home and talked about it. She took it home and put it in a drawer with the other drafts.