The last night I’d spent with Melanie had been in her little house outside Durham. It rained so hard I thought the roof was going to come down on us, and when we had sex, Melanie wouldn’t make a sound no matter what I did. In the morning, over pancakes, she told me she was unhappy, that she needed time to think. Then, half an hour later, while I sat drinking coffee in a diner down the street, she called and told me that, actually, she’d thought about it enough. The rain turned to snow near the fourth tollbooth in Delaware, and kept at it for the next two days.

My mother opened the porch door.

“I don’t care that you’re smoking,” she said. “As long as it’s just for now.”

It was true, she didn’t care. If I caught my kid smoking, I’d make him smoke a whole pack, or hang a burning cigarette around his neck for twenty-four hours like a dog that’s killed a chicken.

“It’s just for now,” I said.

“You know, if you don’t go to bed, Santa won’t come.”

“Ma, it’s only nine-thirty.”

“Not in the North Pole it isn’t,” she said. “How does Patricia seem to you?”

“A little on edge,” I said. “But straight.”

“And you?” my mother said.

I tossed my cigarette toward the trees. It landed, still lit despite the snow, in the middle of the yard. “Similar.”

When I went inside, Patricia was wrapping presents at the kitchen table.

“I hate to see you like this,” she said.

“Would you drive me to the train?” I said. “I want to go to New York.”

“No,” she said.

“Would you shoot me in the head?”

“Help me wrap this,” she said. I sat down across the table from her and put Yoshi in my lap. She squirmed and whined but I held her tight.

“This is what I got Mom,” Patricia said. It was a jagged chunk of shiny blue rock. “It’s from Brazil. I always get her books, so I thought, This year, make it a rock.”

“Expensive?”

“The heart’s love is priceless,” she said.