Page 89

Kelsey didn’t say anything. I took a picture of the bulbs and sent it to Mark.

Trier: Annual Christmas Eve hardware run. We came home with the wrong size.

Mark: Of course you did. Who was in charge of the expedition?

Trier: Russ. He always is.

By five, two leaves had been added to the dining table, and Russ had retrieved a card table from the basement. Kelsey’s cousin Lori drove in from Joplin with her husband and their two boys. She brought a cheese ball rolled in chopped pecans, shaped into the Steamers logo. Kelsey put it in the center of the table.

I took the chair I’d had every Christmas Eve since Josh was in a high chair, with Russ on my left so he could pass me things I hadn’t asked for. My phone buzzed while the ham was going around. It was a photograph from Felix’s kitchen: every oven rack full, a baking dish waiting on the stovetop, and Felix’s hand reaching into the frame.

Mark: Dana proposed cutting the stuffed mushrooms to free up a rack. Felix has begun listing the guests who would be devastated. He’s on the fourth name. One of them wasn’t invited.

I snorted into my water, and Kelsey made me read it aloud.

“Does this Felix cook for a living?” Lori’s husband asked.

“No. He just supervises other people’s kitchens,” I said. “He brought his own sharpener to Mark’s condo and sharpened every knife Mark owned before he’d let him cut a tomato. Then he emptied the utensil drawer to prove a point. Mark owns three bottle openers and nothing that can reliably peel a carrot.”

Josh put down his fork. “Then how does he peel carrots?”

“I don’t think he does.”

“What about potatoes?”

“He makes potato soup. I’ve never asked.”

Josh looked at me with real concern. “You should ask.”

“Does he cook, though?” Russ asked. “Or just eat Felix’s?”

“He cooks. There’s a chicken with lemon and olives that we’ve been working on. It’s getting better, but we disagree about why.”

Lori asked whether Mark was the outdoorsy type. I told her he climbed with Felix and Dana at a gym with walls taller than the house, and that Dana was fifty-three and could stand up on a hold the width of a pencil. Josh looked down at his feet.

“Mark’s funny on the cat thread,” Kelsey said. “After my Dallas report, he asked if I’d considered sending it to St. Louis directly.”

“I know. He asked me first whether you’d take it as a compliment or an attack. I told him both.”

“You were right.”

After pie, I photographed Josh holding his frog up with both hands, its eyes level with his.

Mark: Blue, if he has blue. A dark one. Does the artist sign his work?

Trier: Josh says it might take until spring.

***

Christmas morning ended with wrapping paper shoved under the couch and Josh asking whether presents were officially over. Kelsey told him his grandmother was still coming at noon.

“She’s probably bringing sweet potatoes, not presents,” Josh said.

The flat package I brought with his name on it was a pad of engineering paper, the green kind with a fine blue grid. I added a mechanical pencil with a metal barrel. The pencil had been Mark’s idea.

He’d looked at a photograph of the marble run in November and said that anyone who drew plans like that deserved a pencil that didn’t need sharpening. Josh held the pad up to the tree lights to look through the grid and announced that it was real engineer paper. He took it to the bridge before breakfast.

The bridge stood in the hallway doorway: two towers of paper-towel tubes on cardboard squares, with flexible plastic track hanging between them in a shallow curve.