Every year it would break in the box, and every year she’d glue it back. Sophie looked at the reindeer. Then she looked at Ethan. Why didn’t she just get a new one? He thought about it. I don’t know. Maybe because it was the same one. Even broken, it was the same one. Sophie absorbed this, turning the reindeer over in her hands.
She was quiet for a moment and he could see her thinking about something, working through it. My mom had this mug, she said finally. The handle broke and she superglued it. She kept using it even though the glue made the handle a little different than before. I asked her why and she said it was her mug. A pause. I know where it is.
In a storage unit with her other stuff. You can get it, Ethan said. Whenever you want, it’s yours. She looked at the reindeer one more time, then wrapped it carefully back in the yellowed newspaper. “I’m putting this on the tree,” she said. “Prominently?” “Yeah,” he said. “It should be prominent.” They decorated the tree that evening, the three of them, in the main room with the old ornaments and a string of lights that Ethan had to untangle for 40 minutes, while Sophie and Victoria sat on the floor and watched with varying degrees of helpfulness. He
offered the lights to both of them three times, and both times they declined, which he felt was a form of cruelty that he would remember. Sophie put the ceramic reindeer near the front at her eye level. She put the paper star at the top, which required Ethan to lift her, the first time he’d done that, her weight against his shoulder, her hands reaching up, the paper star settling crookedly on the topmost branch.
He sat her down and she looked at the star and then looked at him and then looked back at the star. “Good,” she said. Victoria was sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking at the tree with her hands wrapped around a mug. The lights were warm against her face. Ethan sat down on the arm of the couch, and the room was quiet except for the sound of the heater, and outside the cold December dark, and the tree, crooked, strung with old ornaments and his grandmother’s history, glowed in the main room of a farmhouse that 3 months ago had
contained only one person and his regrets. “It’s a good tree,” Victoria said. “It’s crooked,” Sophie said. “The best ones usually are,” Victoria said. Sophie looked at the tree for another moment. Then she got up, picked up her drawing pad from the side table where she’d left it, sat back down on the floor, and began drawing the tree.
The sound of pencil on paper joined the heater and the dark outside, and nobody said anything, and the evening held a meet. Sophie’s birthday fell on a Sunday that year, 3 days after Christmas. She turned 8 with the particular quiet of a child who had not had birthday parties in recent memory. Her mother had been sick for most of her seventh year, and before that it had been just the two of them, small celebrations in a small apartment.
The joy real, but the scale modest. Ethan had been planning this for 3 weeks in the way that a person who is not good at planning plans things by worrying about it and making lists and second-guessing and ultimately doing something simpler and more direct than anything on the lists.
He made her a cake, a real one, from scratch, which he had never done before in his life, and which required two failed attempts, and a phone call to a woman named Bev at the Dunore Bakery, who talked him through it with the patience of someone who had talked a lot of intimidated people through their first cake. The result was not beautiful.
It was chocolate, which Sophie had mentioned once, and never again in the way kids mention things they want without wanting to want them. and the frosting was slightly uneven and the layers were not quite level, but it tasted like a real chocolate cake. And when he carried it out of the kitchen with eight candles on it, Sophie looked at it the way she had looked at the snow coming down in December with that focused, proprietary, almost startled attention. “You made this?” she said.
“Don’t look too closely at the frosting,” he said. She looked at the frosting. “It’s fine,” she said then quietly. It’s really good. Victoria had found without telling anyone that Sophie’s favorite color was green. This was not obvious information. She had apparently determined it through some oblique conversation about pencil colors and had ordered from a Portland art supply shop a full set of professional-grade colored pencils in a wooden case with a sliding lid, including every shade of green in the catalog. She set the box on the table
next to the cake, and Sophie opened it and went completely still. She looked at the pencils for a long time, laid out in their rows, greens fading from yellow lime to deep forest, every gradation. “These are the real ones,” she said. “Yeah,” Victoria said. “These are the ones professional illustrators use.
” “I know.” Sophie closed the box carefully, ran her thumb over the sliding lid, and set it back on the table. She didn’t reach for it again immediately, and Ethan realized she was saving it, putting off opening the real thing so it wouldn’t be over, the way you save the best part of a meal. He understood that instinct more than he could say.
He’d also made one other thing, and he wasn’t sure about it, and he almost didn’t give it. And then he did. It was a wooden box. He’d made it in the barn over three evenings, working by the light of the work lamp from a piece of walnut plank he’d been keeping for a project that had never materialized. It wasn’t fancy.
Dovetail joints because he liked the look of them. A small brass hinge for the lid. No ornamentation except that he’d carved her initials into the top SB, which was, if you were being accurate, what her initials were now, though he hadn’t been certain about that until he was carving them. And once he’d carved them, he’d stood there in the cold barn for a moment, wondering if he’d overstepped.
