It is the perfect tree, symmetrical and full, and she likes it even more for having picked it out herself and having helped to cut it down and drag it out from the woods. Her father seems as proud of the tree as she is, and she smiles as she pictures him walking through the snow before her with an ax slung over his shoulder like a real woodsman. Much better than last year, when the three of them had stood shivering on a curb in the city and examined each tree a vendor had cut free of its netting. They must have looked at twelve or fifteen trees at least, and, at first, her parents had remarked on each one brightly—this looks like a good one, don’t you think?—and she had shrugged her indifference from where she leaned against the building—I don’t care, she’d said, because she didn’t. So the vendor had unwrapped another tree, and then another and still another until finally, all possibility of fun bled from the evening, her parents had settled on a tree. They had walked home silently, one parent at either end of the tree, Isabelle trailing behind, and her father had dropped his end and chipped the bottom of the trunk, and her mother had said the tree would be crooked now, and then the top of the tree had snapped as they’d stood it in the elevator, and then the lights had gone on crooked. No, she thinks now, in the bath. Far better this year speechless.

But then she thinks of the hours before they went to cut the tree, when she sat sullenly and refused her father’s company. She grits her teeth in shame. It wasn’t her father’s fault that she didn’t get the breakfast that she wanted, yet she punished him for it anyway. Sometimes when she thinks about herself she can’t believe she is the person that she is, a person she often doesn’t like. What she’s not sure of is whether she’s more angry at herself for getting angry at her father, or for having been unable to order that breakfast sandwich. She pictures all their food on the table, and how she couldn’t bring herself to eat more than a bite of the extra-chocolaty chocolate-chip pancakes that she knows would have been delicious.