There’s one box left. Tess isn’t mean, she’s just uptight. Kate has always liked her best when they’re alone and after a few drinks. Often, in their twenties—Tess and Martin have been together since Kate was still in college—they’d run out of things to talk about and ended up talking shit: about Tess’s sisters, who Kate knew Tess didn’t like; about Helen, who asked too many questions, demanded they get dressed up when they didn’t want to, corralled them into the kitchen to cook, though Tess can’t cook, to just be present for the party, when neither of them felt quite up to it; about the men, such safe, easy targets then. And then Kate said something too harsh about one of Tess’s sisters; Tess said something condescending about Helen’s party making, and their burgeoning relationship would stutter to a halt. When they had kids, they suddenly had plenty to talk about again: the endlessness of sleep and food and schools and siblings. They’re closer now, Kate likes to think, because of this.

Alice doesn’t have kids but Kate finds her softer, less condescending and controlling. At Helen’s funeral, it was Alice who took Kate’s kids out for ice cream, let them run an hour on the beach so that Kate could cry on top of the covers in Helen’s bed by herself.

It’s as if neither of them, Alice nor Tess, knew what family was before they married Kate’s brothers. Alice is an only child, which Kate figures is not her fault; the art stuff made Kate worry that all the ways she likes to decorate her home, likes the children to be dressed up at family get-togethers, would be garish, maybe childish, to Alice, as she imagined they were to Tess. But Alice always made small efforts: complimented Kate’s and the kids’ outfits, bought Kate serving platters and artisanally made bowls in the same colors as Kate’s china.

“Help would be great,” Kate says to Tess and Alice, nodding toward the box of ornaments and old tissue paper. Helen reused wrapping paper, gift bags, so as not to waste but also to save money. Once Henry became obsessed with climate, Helen claimed that as a reason too.

The ornaments that are still left are all nearly falling to pieces—a cardboard circle painted by a seven-year-old Martin with his picture on it, smiling, front right tooth missing, Merry Krsmas scrawled in red beneath his smiling face.

“He looks like Colin,” Alice says, fingering the picture.

“Colin looks like him,” says Tess.

They look at the tree as if it is some strange beast that’s just formed before them.

“Where does it go?” asks Tess.

“Wherever you want,” Kate says.