Renee watched him do it. She would remember that too: that she watched. That she saw his eyes go to the left stocking, stuffed so full the teddy bear was falling out, the snowman's hat tipping over the cuff, and light up. And then go to the right one, his, with his name in red yarn, hanging flat and straight and empty on its hook. And stop.
He walked over to it. He was so small next to the mantel. He reached up and touched the bottom of it, and it swung, weightless. He looked inside, standing on his toes, as if something might be hiding down in the toe of it. Nothing was.
He turned around and found her face.
"Did Santa forget mine?"
His voice was not loud. He did not whine it. He asked it the way he asked whether bees could sleep, wanting to understand the rule.
Renee heard herself answer before she had thought. It came out flat and cold, in a voice she recognized from her own mother on her worst days, a voice she had sworn as a girl she would never use on anybody.
"You have enough."
Jonah blinked. He looked at the empty stocking again. He looked at the tree, at the presents, and his face did a complicated thing as he tried to work out what enough meant, and where it was, and whether it was one of the boxes.
"Look!"
Brielle was on her knees by the tree. She had found the small brown package with no tag on it and torn it open in two pulls, because Brielle did not believe in saving paper, and now she was holding up the wind-up Santa in both hands, turning it so the lights flashed off its painted belt buckle and its little brass key.
"Look, Jonah! It's Santa! It's a little Santa!"
And Jonah's face changed. All of it. It was like watching somebody turn on the lights in a dark house, room by room. His eyes went wide. His mouth fell open. He knew that Santa. He had stood in front of it at the pharmacy so many times with his hands on the counter edge, not asking. He took a step toward his sister, and another, and he reached out one hand, palm up, fingers open, in a gesture so trusting that later, much later, Renee would wake up from sleep with it printed on the inside of her eyelids.
"That's actually for your sister," Renee said, from behind him.