And then it was December again.
She came home on the twenty-first, on the train, with a duffel bag of laundry and a box of maple candy for everyone. Her father picked her up at the station. When they turned onto their street, she saw the tree in the front window, nine feet tall, white lights, the glass ornaments catching the gold of the streetlamp, and she felt the old familiar tightening in her chest.
It lasted until she walked into the living room.
The tree was the same. The garland was the same. But on the lower branches, mixed in among her mother's careful glass ornaments, were a dozen lumpy ceramic ones in uneven glazes of blue and green and orange, each with a name scratched into the back. Madison's pottery class. One of them was shaped, vaguely, like a fish. It had a C on the back.
"It's from the picture," Madison said, appearing at her shoulder and throwing her arms around her. "On your corkboard. The one with Grandma and the dock. It's supposed to be a trout. It looks like a potato."
"It looks like a trout," Claire said, and hugged her back.
Then she looked at the mantel.
There were five stockings now. One for Grandma Ruth, deep red, new. And they were not in the old order. They hung left to right in the order of the family's birthdays, oldest to youngest: Ruth, Greg, Diane, Claire, Madison. All five hooks were the same. Claire reached up and touched hers, and it didn't tip. It hung perfectly straight.
"Your mother replaced the hooks," her father said quietly, behind her. "All of them. She went to three different stores to find ones that matched."
Claire didn't trust herself to say anything. She just nodded.
Grandma Ruth arrived on Christmas Eve, this time driven by her son, with the cane and a casserole dish of sweet potatoes, and this time Diane met her on the porch and took the dish from her hands and said, "I made the marshmallow kind. We'll have two," and Grandma Ruth laughed so hard she had to hold onto the railing.
Christmas morning came gray and quiet, with snow in the forecast and none yet falling. Madison came down first, at seven, because some things don't change. Diane followed with her coffee and her phone. Greg came down in his robe. Grandma Ruth took the good armchair by the fire. And Claire sat on the couch, not at the far end by the cold window, but in the middle, with her sister leaning against her shoulder.
Nobody told her to hand out the presents. Her father did it instead, reading each tag aloud with great seriousness, and getting several of them wrong.