Ruth raises her eyebrows. “Nothing,” she says, but she cannot quite control the edge to her voice. “Why do you ask?” She blinks and looks out the windshield at the lines passing beneath their car. She sees Wilson shrug out of the corner of her eye.

“You could have stayed, you know.”

She rolls her eyes toward him. “Wilson.”

Wilson shrugs.

“What bothers me,” Ruth says after a minute, “is that he just shows up, and then he makes it out as if I’ve specifically asked him.”

“Well, you did, didn’t you?”

Ruth shifts in her seat. “I offered,” she says. “I said some weekend. I didn’t say this weekend. I would never suggest Christmas weekend. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve!”

Wilson sniffs.

“And of course I get made out as the villain in all this. Of course everything is my fault.”

Wilson glances in the rearview mirror. “No one thinks you’re a villain, Ruth.”

“My brother is furious because we had plans, even though I’d invited him,” she continues, and here she lowers her voice, “I’m sure Isabelle’s furious because her uncle charmed her, and you’re furious because we’re a day behind in getting to your mother’s.”

“I’m furious?”

Ruth pictures her brother as she’d seen him early this morning through the glass doors of the den, his suitcase open at the foot of the fold-out couch, the blankets twisted around the hulk of his body, a bath towel draped over the back of an antique chair. She groans inwardly. “We shouldn’t have left him there,” she says.

“Like I said, Ruth, you could have stayed.”

“I didn’t want to stay, Wilson. I didn’t want him to stay either, but what was I supposed to do?”

The highway bends; around the corner, brake lights glow. “Shit,” Wilson mutters, slowing the car. “We’re never going to get there.”

“See, you are furious,” Ruth says.

“Ruth,” Wilson says.

“Well, I’m sorry.”

Wilson says nothing.

Ruth shuts her eyes. She is tired, but she will be a good sport, she tells herself again, just as Wilson was last night, rushing to get dinner for her brother as if it had been the plan all along. “Wil,” she says, opening her eyes. “I need to pee.”

Wilson pulls into the next rest stop as smoothly as he can, but when he glances at Isabelle in the rearview mirror as they come to a stop he sees that the change in momentum has woken her anyway.

Ruth opens the door partway and then turns to Isabelle. “Do you need to go?” she asks.

Isabelle shakes her head. Her cheek is ridged from pressing against the upholstery.

“We’ve got a couple more hours,” Wilson says. “Sure you’re okay?”