He opened the kitchen door. It swung on its bad hinge.
"I'm going to show her the bike," he said, "and then I'm going to fill his stocking. And my mother's coming at two, like always. I'm not calling her off."
"Terry—"
"I'm not calling her off," he said again, and went out.
***
The bike was a success, in the way that things can be a success on a day that has already broken. Brielle shrieked when he pulled off the tarp, and rode it in tight wobbly circles on the cleared part of the garage floor in her boots and pajamas, and fell off once and got right back on. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen and watched her and felt nothing much at all.
Then he went to the closet and found the bag Renee had told him about. A candy cane, a small red rubber ball, a box of eight crayons. He stood holding it and thought about not using it, about driving to the twenty-four-hour CVS out by the highway for different things, things she had not touched. Then he thought about leaving Jonah alone in the house for forty minutes on this particular morning, and he put the bag in his pocket.
He added an orange from the fruit bowl, because his own father had always put an orange in the toe. He went upstairs and dug in the shoebox at the back of his dresser drawer and found the little blues harp his uncle had given him when he was nine, a Hohner in the key of C, the chrome dull with thirty years. He rinsed it in the bathroom sink and dried it on his shirt.
When he came back into the living room, Jonah had not moved from under the fleece throw. The strawberry hat package was still unopened in his lap. The Santa was still in his hands.
Terrence took the stocking down off the mantel and sat on the floor in front of the sofa with it, where Jonah could see. He did not pretend. He did not say Santa came back. He put each thing in, one at a time, and said what it was. "Orange. Candy cane. Crayons. That's a ball, it bounces. And this was mine when I was a kid. It's a harmonica. You blow in it, it makes music. I'll show you." He held the stocking out. "Now this one's yours, too."
Jonah looked at the stocking. He did not take it. After a minute Terrence laid it on the sofa beside him, close, touching his leg.
Brielle came in from the garage, pink-cheeked, and stood looking at the stocking. Then she went to her own, which she had emptied onto the rug in a heap, and dug through the heap and found the plush snowman with the felt carrot nose. She came back and stuffed it into the top of Jonah's stocking, headfirst, so its little black boots stuck out.
"So it's even," she said, and went back to her heap.