Out the window, next to the highway, the trees are bare, and there’s a light layer of snow on the ground. The road rolls and curves, and Josh keeps his eyes straight ahead. Kate presses her forehead against the window’s cold and tightens her hand steadily on Jack’s foot. She thinks how the foliage should be getting lusher, greener as they drive southward; the land should be flattening out instead of rising up in rocky jags. She thinks of all that warmth—how they should be changing halfway, at the rest stop, into shorts and T-shirts, letting the kids stay up late to go out to the beach as soon as they get there, to swim and wave-chase, feet dug deep in the hot sand. She thinks of the salt air and the smell of going outside barefoot, wet grass on her ankles, cradling her hot cup of coffee, sitting and talking every morning beneath the big banyan in her mom’s backyard. Instead the air is getting thinner, sharper, outside her window; it all looks cold and dead.

She wants to ask her brothers to let her and her family live in their mother’s house until her kids are off to college. They’ve always had money, Josh’s inheritance. If this were two years ago, she’d just offer to buy her siblings out. But Josh went rogue and overinvested in a tech stock that tanked during the last recession. She thinks her brothers might be willing—she’s the youngest. Ten years in which they can fix the house, up the value, sell and split the proceeds. A loan of sorts.

“Tess,” she starts, already envisioning Tess’s forehead creasing.

Josh makes the face he makes when she says “Tess.”

“I feel like Alice, even,” she says, “might understand.”

Alice and Henry

“I thought maybe once she died I’d get Christmas,” says Alice’s mother on the phone from San Francisco.

Alice lights a cigarette, attaches and inserts her earbuds as she pulls out of the Food Town parking lot. “Mother, stop,” she says.

“It’s not like she might hear.”

“You order in lo mein for Christmas.”

“We order lo mein because we’re all alone. Because our only child isn’t here.”

“We got Chinese food every year.”

“The only ritual you ever cared about was that woman’s.”

“Mom. She’s dead. You can say her name.”

“Helen. Fine. You only ever liked Helen and her absurd, simplistic rituals; never me and mine.”