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"How's Hildie? Your aunt, I mean."

"Good week. I got back here Monday after spending Thanksgiving with her." He shifts Graham higher. "I can drive to Sarasota now in twelve hours. I don't have to rely on crappy clown cars anymore. I can take my truck."

"I bet she likes having you closer."

He gives the babies back. "Tell your mother thanks for the casserole. I ate the whole thing myself."

I watch him walk back toward Dell and his ridiculous hog. Three months ago Carson North belonged fifteen hundred miles away. Now he's standing in the livestock barn at the Holly Ridge Christmas market in a cowboy hat, debating about whether something is a pig or a hog.

A laugh slips out before I can stop it.

By nine on Sunday, the house is quiet, both babies asleep, the refrigerator humming in the dark kitchen. I'm wiping down a counter I already wiped once when the phone lights up.

In the new house. Mostly empty. Closed Friday.

I stop with the rag in my hand.

Would like to see Graham and Hildie over the holidays. Whenever suits you, I'll make work.

Then three dots, and a second message.

If it would help you, I can take them overnight. Or a full day. Whatever you're comfortable with.

I read it standing up. Then I pull out the chair and sit down and read it again, slower.

He's never had either one of them alone for a full hour. He has fed them beside me and changed them beside me, but there has always been another adult within reach. They're four and a half months old, three adjusted, and Graham still acts personally betrayed if his bottle isn't exactly right.

And he's offering to take both. Overnight. I set the phone down and pick it up again.

There isn't anything after it. No reason I should, no reminder that Mom can't stay forever, no attempt to talk me into it.

Down the hall, my mother's door is shut. Her lights are off. She'll be up at four, same as me, because that's the shift she took without being asked.

I think about a night where I am not the one who hears the first cry. Where somebody else warms the bottle and checks the degree and walks the den at two. I haven't slept through a night since August. Neither has Mom. There are mornings I would hand somebody fifty dollars just to drink a cup of coffee before it goes cold.

He's thirty minutes away. He moved here precisely for this reason, so I start typing.

Sometime over the holidays is fine. I'll let you know a day.

I look at it and decide not to add anything. I send it. The dots come, then go, then come again.

Yes ma'am.

That's all. He doesn't mention the overnight again.

I get up and go to bed and leave the phone where it is.

Christmas Eve starts at ten minutes past midnight.

Hildie goes off first, high and thin, and before I can get her up, Graham catches it. Now both of them are screaming, and I have one on each shoulder, and I'm walking the length of the den and back, the length of it and back, and none of it works.

I try the swing. Hildie arches so hard I have to pull her out before I get the strap buckled. So I carry them out to the hall because the change in air sometimes works. It doesn't. I bounce, knees going, the specific bounce, and my calves burn, and Hildie's cry climbs a step every time I think she's dropping.

I go for the car seat and buckle Graham in, and rock the handle. He screams through it. I unbuckle him and pick him up.

By one-thirty I'm crying too, quiet, wiping my face on my shoulder because both hands are full, and I keep going because there is nothing to do but keep going. My arms are shaking, and my shirt is soaked through where Hildie's head keeps pressing.

Mom's still sleeping through it all. She was up Tuesday and again Wednesday, and she drove over to Ms. Moroska's yesterday afternoon and stayed past dinner. She came home gray around the mouth. She would get up right now if I opened that door and said one word.