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“Apparently not.”

She looks at me. Then at the door. Then at me again. And I watch her try not to show that she wants it.

“Do you want to help?”

She nods politely. She’s already reaching for her shoes. “I would love to.”

She gets her shoes on, both of them, fast, without untying them, the backs folded down under her heels. She’s up off the couch before I am. She’s at the door before I’ve put my phone in my pocket.

She stops there with her hand on the frame and looks back at me, waiting, with her face doing that thing again, every light in the house turned on at once.

I get up.

And I follow.

23

Is This Supposed to Be a Snowman?

Tessa

The Christmas tree is ten feet tall, and we need a ladder to reach the top.

It’s in the front room, the big one with the windows that go almost to the ceiling, standing in a stand the size of a bathtub, still with the netting marks pressed into its branches. It smells like the whole forest got brought inside. There are boxes everywhere on the rug. Not the matching silver ones I pictured. Old cardboard boxes, soft at the corners, with masking tape on the sides and handwriting on the tape. Lights. Glass—CAREFUL. R’s stuff. Old house.

The ladder is wood, paint-splattered, the kind somebody’s had for thirty years. It probably still costs more than anything I own. It’s a vintage ladder that I can appreciate.

Rafe’s halfway up it with a strand of lights over his shoulder and a hook in his teeth. His mom holds the bottom with both hands and tells him he’s going to fall. He isn’t going to fall. He says so, around the hook.

“You’re going to fall,” she says again.

“I’m not going to fall.”

“You fell off this exact ladder—”

“I was seven.”

“You were nine. You broke your wrist.”

“That was the back steps.”

“It was a fall, Rafferty.”

I’m standing by the window with a box of ornaments in my arms that his mom handed me the second I walked in, like I’ve been doing this every year of my life. There’s Christmas music on, coming out of speakers I can’t see. She put a plate of cookies on the coffee table, the frosted kind, shaped like stars and bells, with sprinkles everywhere.

And I stand there holding the box, and I watch them. They’re doing this together. His mom is laughing at him. He’s pretending to be annoyed. She’s holding the ladder.

“Tessa, honey, can you hand him that green one? The long strand. No, the other green one. That one.”

I hand it up. Rafe takes it without looking down. Our fingers don’t touch.

His father isn’t here. When we came down, his mom said she’d asked him to bring up the last box from the basement, and he’d said he was busy, and she’d said, “Of course you are,” in a voice that made Rafe look at the ceiling.

Twenty minutes later, he comes in carrying the box from the basement.

He doesn’t say anything about it. He just puts it down on the rug, opens it, takes out three glass ornaments wrapped in tissue, unwraps them, and stands there in front of the tree with them in his hand, looking at the branches.

“That’s lopsided,” he says.