Renée and Matt sat next to each other on folding chairs in the fourth row. They clapped in the right places. When the angel of the Lord, a fourth-grader in a gold tinsel halo, forgot her line and burst into tears, Matt laughed softly, and Renée laughed too, and for a second their shoulders touched, and neither of them pulled away, and neither of them leaned in.
In the car afterward, Ivy, still in her bathrobe, talked nonstop about Elijah, who had told her his grandma had a real sheep on a farm in Wisconsin. Then, somewhere around the turn onto Larkspur Court, she went quiet. Renée glanced in the mirror. Ivy was looking out the window at the lights on the neighbors' houses, the inflatable snowmen and the reindeer made of white wire.
"Mommy," she said. "Did you and Daddy have a fight?"
Matt's hands tightened on the wheel.
"We're having a hard time right now, baby," Renée said. "Grown-ups have hard times sometimes."
"Is it because of the cardigan?"
Neither of them answered right away.
"Is it because I told?"
Matt pulled into the driveway and put the car in park and did not turn off the engine. The headlights lit up the garage door, white and blank. Then he turned around in his seat, all the way, so that he was facing his daughter in her booster seat in the back.
"Ivy," he said. "Look at me, Bug."
She looked at him.