Claire saw the headlights from her window and was down the stairs and out the front door before anyone else had noticed. The air was sharp enough to sting. Snow had started an hour before, light and dry, and it caught in her grandmother's white hair as she climbed out of the driver's seat with a cane in one hand and a casserole dish in the other.
"Don't you dare take this cane from me, I've grown attached to it," Grandma Ruth said. "Take the dish. It's the sweet potatoes. Your mother will say she already made sweet potatoes. She'll be right. We'll have two kinds."
Claire took the dish and then, awkwardly, because her hands were full, leaned in for a hug. Her grandmother wrapped an arm around her and held on, and she smelled the way she always smelled, like wool and lavender and the faint woodsmoke of a house heated by a stove.
"Let me look at you," Grandma Ruth said, stepping back. Her eyes, a pale clear blue, moved over Claire's face with a teacher's attention. "You're too thin. And you're tired. Are you sleeping?"
"I'm fine. I've been working a lot."
"Working where?"
"The bakery on Fulton. Delaney's."
"Since when?"
"Since September."
Her grandmother's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Your father didn't mention it."
Claire shrugged, because there was nothing to say to that. Her father didn't mention a lot of things. He was a quiet, decent, tired man who sold commercial insurance and came home at seven and fell asleep in his chair by nine, and somewhere along the way he had decided that the house and the girls were Diane's department. He loved Claire, she was fairly sure. He simply didn't look at her very often.
The front door opened behind them, and Greg Hollis came out onto the porch in his socks.
"Mom! You drove? I told you I'd come get you."
"And I told you I'm seventy-four, not dead." Grandma Ruth let her son kiss her cheek. "Get my bag out of the trunk. Be careful, there's something fragile in it."
Inside, Diane was all warmth and performance, the way she was with any guest. She took Grandma Ruth's coat, exclaimed over the sweet potatoes, did not mention that she had already made sweet potatoes, and steered her toward the good armchair by the fire. Madison came down in a red velvet dress she had clearly been saving for the occasion, kissed her grandmother on both cheeks like someone in a movie, and asked if she'd seen her latest video, which had gotten eleven thousand views.
"I don't know what that means, sweetheart, but it sounds like a lot of people," Grandma Ruth said.
"It's so many people."
"Then I'm very impressed."
Claire stood in the doorway between the hall and the living room and watched her grandmother's gaze move, slowly and without seeming to, around the room. It went over the tree. Over the mantel and the four stockings, the loose hook, the stocking tipping toward the screen. Over the heap of silver-and-white presents spilling out from under the lowest branches and halfway across the rug. Claire watched her grandmother count something, and then she watched her decide not to say anything about it yet.