It’s not my room, Victoria said, draping her wet coat over a chair. It’s the guest room. And yes, I have hot chocolate. I brought it from Portland. It’s good chocolate. Actual cocoa, not the packet stuff. Please, Sophie said. Victoria went upstairs and came back with a small tin and made hot chocolate on the stove the proper way with whole milk and cocoa powder and a small amount of something she didn’t name but that made it taste different, better, darker.
She made three mugs. They sat around the kitchen table with steam rising from the mugs and the snow still falling outside and Sophie’s wet socks on the heater vent and nobody said anything for a while that needed saying. It was not a turning point. Turning points were cleaner than this, more obvious.
But it was something, a notch in the wood, a small mark made. What? The counselor Patricia Osman had recommended was a woman named Dr. Ingred Hail, who worked out of an office in town above the pharmacy. She was probably 60, softspoken, with the kind of stillness that came from decades of sitting with people in difficult moments.
Sophie attended their first session with the determined neutrality of someone who had agreed under duress and intended to make that clear through strategic non-participation. She came back to the car afterward and got in and said nothing. Ethan drove. After about 5 minutes, she said she asked me to describe my house.
Old house, he said. I described it. She asked which was my favorite part. What did you say? I said, “The desk in my room because it has a good light.” A pause. She asked if I had a favorite person to draw. Sophie looked out the window. I said, “My mom.” And she said, “What would I draw about my mom if I could draw anything?” And I said I would draw the way she laughed with her whole face and how she always had paint or something on her hands because she liked to make things even when she was tired.
The truck moved through the town, past the feed store and the diner and the library with its handlettered sign. She sounds like she was something, Ethan said carefully. She was, Sophie said with the simple certainty of a child who has no doubt about this. Then Dr. Hail said I should bring some of my drawings next time. Do you want to? Maybe.
A pause. She doesn’t seem fake. Some adults seem fake when they ask you things. She doesn’t. That’s a good sign. Sophie leaned her head against the window. She asked about you, too. He kept his eyes on the road. What did you say? I said you were trying. A pause. She asked if that was enough, and I said I didn’t know yet.
She said that was a fair answer. He didn’t respond to that. There wasn’t a response that wouldn’t be either too much or too little. And Sophie seemed to understand that because she let it sit without expectation. Can we get the cereal with the marshmallows? She said at the store. Sure, he said. Yeah, we can get that. Christmas arrived the way holidays arrive in households that are not yet sure of themselves with a combination of effort and uncertainty that sometimes produced warmth and sometimes produced the anxious awareness of what was
missing. Ethan had not put up a tree in 4 years. He’d never seen the point living alone. But Sophie was 8 in 2 weeks. Her birthday was December 29th, a detail Karen Reeves had included in the initial paperwork that Ethan had transferred to his phone and read several times since. And Christmas was coming and he had a daughter.
And so he drove to the lot outside the hardware store and came back with a 7-ft Douglas fur that didn’t quite fit in the truck bed and shed needles on the kitchen floor when he brought it in. Sophie appeared at the top of the stairs when she heard the commotion. What is that? She said. Tree? Ethan said from behind the branches. I can see it’s a tree.
Why is it inside? Because it’s Christmas. Help me with the stand. She came down the stairs and helped him wrestle the tree into the stand, which required three adjustments and one full restart and considerable language from Ethan that he was careful not to say too loudly. Victoria watched from the doorway with an expression that suggested she was finding this entertaining but was too composed to say so. It’s crooked.
Sophie said it’s a tree. It was crooked before I cut it. It’s more crooked now. Sophie. I’m just saying. Can you hand me that thing? He pointed at the tightening bolt at the base of the stand. She handed it to him. He tightened it. The tree remained crooked, but acceptably so. The kind of crooked that looked intentional if you squinted.
We don’t have ornaments, Victoria said from the doorway. I have some in a box in the barn. My grandmother’s. He stood up, brushing pine needles off his shirt. They’re old. Some of them are broken. Can I see them? Sophie said. They went to the barn, all three of them in the cold with flashlights, and found the box under a workbench behind a set of old pruning shears and a tarp that smelled like motor oil.
The box itself was cardboard battered with Ethan’s grandmother’s handwriting on the side and marker. Christmas 1978. Inside, wrapped in old newspaper that had long since gone yellow, were ornaments of the specific kind that families accumulate over generations. glass balls in faded colors, a ceramic reindeer with one leg repaired with old glue, a paper star that had survived somehow through decades of boxes and moves, a small painted wooden bear that Ethan had no memory of and no explanation for.
Sophie unwrapped each one carefully, the way she handled things she was trying to understand. “These are old,” she said. “Yeah.” “Were they your grandmas?” “My grandmother’s? She was the one who kept Christmas in our family.” He picked up the ceramic reindeer, turned it over. The repaired leg was slightly the wrong color. She fixed this probably 10 times.
