Renée considered the knot. She thought about the man in the recliner a year ago, a bomb technician with a snarl in his lap. She thought about the half-strung lights on a porch on Elm Street in Arden Grove, and the clips along the railing, and how she had finished hanging them for a stranger without knowing why. She thought about how many years she had spent being the one who fixed things, quickly and cleanly and alone, so sure of every fold.
She sat down on the rug, cross-legged, where she had once sat wrapping presents.
"Bring them here," she said.
Matt hesitated, and then he sat down across from her, and Ivy dumped the lights between them, and the three of them looked at the knot.
"Where do we even start," Matt said.
"You find an end," said Renée. "And you just start."
She found one. She held it up. He found the other. For a while neither of them said anything; they just worked, their hands moving through the tangle from opposite sides, threading loops through loops, passing slack back and forth. Ivy lay on her stomach between them in her medium-sparkle cardigan, chin in her hands, offering advice that was mostly wrong. Once their fingers touched in the middle of the knot, and Renée did not pull away, and neither did he. Outside, the snow kept falling, slow and heavy and deliberate, and the neighborhood held its breath, and the tree hummed in the corner with its soft warm light.
It took almost an hour. When the last loop came free, Ivy cheered, and Matt sat back on his heels and laughed, a little hoarsely, and held up his end of the strand. Twenty feet of green wire lay straight across the rug between them, from his hands to hers.
"Porch?" he said.
Renée looked at him. She looked at the stocking with his name on it, and the canning jar lids turning on their single hook, and her daughter's face, lit up, waiting. She did not know yet what she would say if he asked her the real question, the one under all the others. She thought she might not know for a long time. She found that she could bear that. She found that it was a kind of relief, not knowing, a kind of room she had never let herself stand in.
"Porch," she said, and stood, and kept hold of her end, and the two of them carried the lights out together into the cold.