“Don’t!” Her uncle’s voice is loud, and she freezes. “It’s going to smudge that way.” Isabelle lets the drawing fall flat against the table. Her uncle is right; the Christmas tree is blurred now—and of course it is! she thinks; she feels her ears begin to burn. What had she been thinking rolling up a charcoal drawing? What kind of artist must she seem, to have to be told by a soldier of all people that charcoal will smudge?

“That yours?” her uncle asks. He is standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the drawing.

Isabelle nods and starts to pull the drawing quickly from the table; it is unfinished and unfit to be seen. But her uncle puts his hand on her shoulder. “Wait,” he says. “You did that?”

His hand is heavy and hard, more like stone than flesh.

“You did that,” he says again.

Isabelle nods, steps out from beneath his grip.

“You know I do some drawing myself,” he says. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

Isabelle shakes her head. That her uncle is an artist surprises her; she always has imagined him with a gun.

“I bet your mom didn’t tell you that, did she?”

Isabelle shakes her head again.

“No, she wouldn’t have.” He takes a step back from the drawing and tilts his head. “Huh,” he says. He squints his eyes and tilts his head the other way. Isabelle looks from her uncle to the drawing, squints her eyes at it, and tilts her own head to see it as her uncle does; the drawing only looks the same, but blurry.

“You heard of mystics?”

Isabelle gives her uncle a questioning look.

“You know what a mystic is?”

Isabelle shakes her head.

“No, you wouldn’t,” he says.

She waits for him to tell her about mystics, but instead he puts his hands on his hips.

“Where’s that coffee?”

Isabelle points to the cabinet where the coffee is kept.

“Where’d that cat get off to, anyway?”

Isabelle glances around her—as if they really had a cat. Maggie has settled in the kitchen doorway, eyes wide, brows twitching. Isabelle kneels to stroke her.

Her uncle turns from the cabinet with the coffee tin in his hand. “Think he’ll bring yer tongue back soon?” he says. That cat; Isabelle smiles, surprising herself. Her uncle spoons coffee grounds into the machine. “What kind of contraption is this?” he mutters. He shakes his head. “In the war we had to make our coffee instant. Sometimes with puddle water.” He pours water into the coffeemaker, and then he pulls out a chair and sits down at the kitchen table. “Know I was in the war?”

Isabelle nods, getting up from beside Maggie on the floor. She moves her drawing to the counter and sits down across the table from her uncle.