"Goodnight, Jonah," she said.
It was not much. It was two words, and her voice cracked in the middle of the second one. But he could not remember the last time he had heard her say the boy's name that way, softly, all the way through, like it belonged to someone.
Jonah did not answer her. He looked at her for a moment more, and then he turned onto his side, toward the wall, and pulled the Santa up under his chin, and closed his eyes.
Renee stood there another few seconds. Then she took her hand off the doorframe and went down the hall, and Terrence heard their bedroom door close, and he did not get up to follow her.
***
He slept on the sofa that night. Nobody had said he had to. He just did not go upstairs.
Before he lay down he went around the living room in the tree light, picking up. Red paper with gold snowflakes, brown paper with too much tape. He found the scraps of twine in the carpet, and in the wastebasket by the end table, crumpled, a candy-cane wrapper and under it, the small brown torn piece of paper that had come off the strawberry hat with its tag.
He had not put that one in the trash. He looked at it for a while. Somebody had picked it up off the rug and smoothed it flat before throwing it away.
He did not know what that meant. He left it where it was.
Upstairs, for a long time, he heard her walking. Back and forth, the old floor answering. Once the footsteps went down the hall toward the sewing room and stopped outside it, and stayed stopped, and he lay on the sofa with his eyes open and waited to hear the door. It did not open. After a while the footsteps went back.
Tomorrow was a Saturday. He would call his mother. On Monday he would call the number on the back of the insurance card and sit on hold and say the words out loud to a stranger, and Renee might go to the appointment or she might not, and he would find out which kind of man he was if she didn't. He would buy Jonah new pajamas, his own, in a size that fit. He would sign him up for swim lessons with the overtime money and tell Renee after, not before, and they would fight about it, and that would be all right. He would make a cake in May. None of it would be enough. He knew that already, lying there. It would not be enough for a long time, and some of it, maybe, would never be.
The tree hummed. On the mantel the two stockings hung side by side again, one emptied onto the rug that morning, the other lumpy with an orange in the toe and a snowman's boots sticking out of the top.
He turned onto his side and looked at them until the lights went soft, and somewhere above him, in a small room with an orange moon on the ceiling, a brass key turned once, crick, as a boy's hand tightened around it in his sleep, and held on.