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“They were fine,” I say.

“They always go by the window.”

“Why?”

He opens his mouth. He closes it.

“I don’t know,” he says. “They just do.”

They just do. Because somebody put them there once, a long time ago, in a smaller house, and then again the year after, and then it was just where they went.

I reach into the box again. My fingers find something lumpy wrapped in a paper towel. I unwrap it.

It’s made of clay. It’s been painted. It’s about the size of my palm and has no clear shape at all, a lump with two smaller lumps on the bottom and a stick coming out of one side, and somebody painted the whole thing blue and then gave up partway through, and there’s a hole poked through the top with a piece of yarn tied through it.

On the bottom in crayon: RAFE.

I hold it up.

“Is this supposed to be a snowman?”

Rafe looks over from the ladder. His whole face changes.

“No,” he says.

“What is it?”

“Put that down.”

“What is it?”

He looks at me for a long second.

“A hockey player,” he says.

I look at the lump. I turn it around. I turn it back. The stick on the side might be a stick. The two lumps on the bottom might be skates. The rest of it might be anything.

“You’re not good at art, I see,” I say.

His mom laughs so hard she has to let go of the ladder.

“Hold the ladder,” Rafe says.

“He made it in kindergarten,” she says to me, pressing against her cheeks. “He cried when the teacher said it looked like a potato.”

“I didn’t cry.”

“You cried for an hour.”

“Hold the ladder, Mom.”

I hang the hockey player right in the front at my eye level next to the wooden reindeer where everybody will see it.

Rafe looks at it from the top of the ladder, then at me.

He doesn’t move it.

By the end, the tree is full and lit. The star on top is crooked. Nobody fixes it. His father looks at it for a long time from the couch with his arms crossed, and I watch him decide to let it go.