Terrence Hollis got home at eleven-forty on Christmas Eve with the cold still in his coat and a plastic pharmacy bag knotted around his wrist so he wouldn't forget it in the truck.
The house was dark except for the tree. Renee had left it on for him, or forgotten to turn it off, and he decided to believe the first one. The white lights made the living room look underwater. Two stockings hung from the mantel over the cold fireplace, both still flat, both with names stitched across the cuffs in his mother's red yarn: BRIELLE on the left, JONAH on the right. She had knitted the second one two years after the first, the year Jonah was born, and it came out a little tighter. Her hands had begun to hurt by then.
He set the bag on the kitchen table and stood for a minute in his socks, listening. The furnace ticked. Upstairs, somebody turned over in bed, and the old floor answered. He thought it was probably Renee. She slept lightly these days, when she slept.
He had worked a ten-hour shift at the distribution center out on Route 9, loading trailers that would be in other states by morning, and his shoulders were singing. The supervisor had let them go two hours early because it was Christmas Eve, which was the kind of gift that only looked like a gift if you didn't check your paycheck. But he had picked up enough overtime in November to do this, and he was going to do it right.
He went down to the basement and brought up the boxes he had hidden behind the water heater three weeks ago. A red metal dump truck with a bed that really tipped. A board book about trains with a fabric caboose on the cover you could rub with your thumb. Dinosaur slippers, green, with soft felt teeth. A wooden puzzle of a farm. A toy xylophone with rainbow keys. A knit hat with a pom-pom shaped like a strawberry, because Jonah was going through a strawberry phase and would not be talked out of it.
And from the pharmacy bag, the last one: a wind-up Santa about the size of Terrence's palm, plastic, with a painted face and a brass key in its back. When you turned the key, Santa waddled forward and swung a tiny bell. It had sat in a display by the register at the Walgreens on Elm since before Thanksgiving, and every single time Terrence had taken Jonah in there for Brielle's inhaler refills, the boy had stopped in front of it, put both hands on the edge of the counter, and stared at it like it was a television. He never asked for it. That was the part that had stuck in Terrence. Jonah was three years and eleven months old, and he had already learned not to ask.
Terrence spread the brown kraft paper out on the kitchen table and found the tape and the scissors in the junk drawer, and he started wrapping.
He was not good at it. His corners came out lumpy, and he used too much tape, and the dump truck took half the roll because of the wheels. But he did each one carefully, and when he was done he took out the pack of brown paper gift tags Renee had bought at the dollar store, the kind with the little hole and a loop of red-and-white twine. He uncapped a black Sharpie.
He wrote the same thing on every tag, in the block capitals he had used since grade school, the ones his teachers had complained about and his foremen had praised:
TO JONAH
LOVE, SANTA
He made the J big, with a hook at the bottom that curled almost all the way back up. He did that on purpose. For two months now he had been teaching Jonah his letters on the back of envelopes at this same table on Sunday mornings, and Jonah could not yet read, but he knew his own J. He would trace it with his finger and say, "That's me," in the serious voice he used for important facts, like that trucks were heavier than cars and that you could not pet a bee.
Terrence tied a tag onto each package. Seven tags. He double-knotted them, because Jonah pulled at things.