There’s no tablecloth for tonight’s dinner, which, Tess knows, Helen would have hated. (For Christmas dinner, Kate will have one that she saved from Helen’s house.) Henry’s in the kitchen, and when Henry cooks, Kate stays away because they’re both too possessive in the kitchen. Henry’s too adventurous in his cooking, Kate says, which Tess thinks means he makes too much of a mess. He only cooks food that was grown or raised within a few miles of where they live, which he’s been doing for years but wasn’t as easy in the city. Martin still jokes that they only moved so Henry wouldn’t starve. He has a greenhouse attached to his studio where they grow plants year-round and he’s friends with a handful of local farmers from whom they now get their beef and pork; he’d long been a vegetarian before he and Alice started trying to get pregnant. Those years, he ate everything that Alice told him—chicken livers and ashwagandha, Tribulus terrestris for sperm motility—but then the getting pregnant was not the part they’d struggled with.

But the night after tomorrow night is Christmas Eve, and Kate will cook and Henry will follow her instructions. All the siblings used to cook together, fighting, laughing, but following Helen’s instructions, standing ready in the kitchen, taking Helen’s orders, while Tess and Alice hung out with the kids alone. None of them seems sure how to proceed now.

Alice smokes a fresh cigarette and watches Josh from the corner of the house, careful to stay out of his sight line. There is something calming, solid, about the repetition, the doggedness with which he piles up brick after brick. He was out here within the first half hour of their arrival. He hugged her and Henry, sipped half a drink, roughhoused with the children, got them riled up, and then he walked outside and left Kate to deal with all those sad old boxes of ornaments they brought.

Alice doesn’t hate Josh the way Tess does. He’s a dilettante, is what Henry says, which is not wrong but also suggests more sophistication than Josh has. He’s a know-it-all and he gets obsessed with these useless things that don’t make sense. Alice prefers, though, his earnestness to the pretensions of most of her old friends from grad school, who also, mostly, were people obsessed with useless things that didn’t make sense. At least Josh’s only goal in this igloo endeavor seems to be to please the children. That he’s misguided and the kids likely won’t notice feels beside the point; at least he’s trying, at least this venture, unlike so many of his others, has something vaguely to do with parenting.

“Can I bum one?”

It’s Martin, whom Alice likes best when he’s not with Tess.