The den of the Kessler house on Larkspur Court had been built for exactly this kind of evening. Renée had known it the first time she walked through with the realtor, nine years earlier, before there was a child, before there was a mortgage, before the word home had become something she said without thinking. A low room, a little sunken, two steps down from the kitchen, with a brick fireplace along the north wall and a window that looked out on the side yard where the snow drifted against the fence. A room for winter. A room that wanted a tree in the corner, and so every year it got one.
This year the tree was a seven-foot Fraser fir that Matt had dragged in from the lot behind the Lutheran church on Saturday, swearing at the netting while Ivy hopped around him in her boots asking whether it had a name. It stood now in its red metal stand, mostly decorated, glittering in the soft warm white of the lights Renée had insisted on years ago, because the colored ones made her feel like she was inside a gas station. Beneath it lay the beginnings of a pile of boxes in silver paper and green.
Along the mantel hung three stockings, embroidered in a careful white script by Matt's mother the Christmas Ivy was born: MATTHEW, RENÉE, IVY. Carol Kessler had stitched the accent on Renée's name wrong the first time, an accent grave instead of an accent aigu, and had redone it without being asked, which Renée had chosen at the time to understand as love. Above the stockings, framed photographs crowded together in a loose line. The wedding at the botanic garden in Glencoe, Renée laughing so hard her eyes had shut. Matt holding newborn Ivy in the hospital where Renée worked, his big pale hand covering almost her whole back. Ivy at three on a beach in Michigan, furious at a wave. A picture of Renée's late father, Raymond Holloway, in his mail carrier's uniform, squinting at the camera with the patience of a man who had walked the same South Side route for thirty-one years.
A plaid throw, red and black, lay across the back of the couch. The heat ticked in the vents. Outside, the snow had started again at dusk, and it fell now in that slow, heavy, deliberate way that made the whole neighborhood seem to hold its breath.
Matthew Kessler sat in the brown leather recliner by the fireplace with a snarl of Christmas lights in his lap. He was forty-two, broad in a way that had once been athletic and was now simply solid, the build of a man who had played offensive line at Arden Grove High and then spent twenty years designing HVAC systems for office parks. His brown hair was cut short and had gone gray at the temples over the last two years, which Renée had told him made him look distinguished and which he had told her made him look like his father. He wore a gray thermal shirt with the sleeves pushed up and dark lounge pants, and his feet, in wool socks, were propped on the footrest. He had a day's stubble. His hazel eyes, which in certain light went almost green, were fixed on the knot in his hands with the grim concentration of a bomb technician.
"Every year," he said, to no one in particular. "I put them away perfectly. I wind them around the cardboard. I label the cardboard. And every year they come out of the box like this."
"Because you don't put them away perfectly," Renée said, without looking up. "You put them away at eleven at night on New Year's Day while watching the Rose Bowl."
"That's a slander."
"It's a fact. I have witnesses."
She was sitting cross-legged on the rug near the tree, surrounded by the apparatus of wrapping: a roll of silver paper with snowflakes, a roll of green, a dispenser of tape she had already refilled once, a pair of good scissors she had hidden from Ivy in the top of the linen closet for the entire month of December. Renée Kessler was thirty-nine, slim and curvy, with rich brown skin that the soft lights warmed to amber and shoulder-length natural curls that she had pushed back from her face with a black headband. She wore a burgundy knit top, dark jeans, and the gold hoops Matt had bought her for their fifth anniversary. She was a labor and delivery nurse at Saint Brigid's Medical Center in Naperville, and she wrapped presents the way she did everything at work, with clean, efficient folds and no wasted motion, creasing each edge with her thumbnail.
She was wrapping a navy quarter-zip for Matt's brother Kevin, who would never wear it.
"How many more?" Matt asked.