Tess lines each kid’s set of shoes along the wall behind them, hangs up their coats. “Of course he is.”

Josh has a trust fund and often does things like this: well intentioned, at the same time useless and infuriating. They talk about Josh sometimes, Martin and Tess, Henry and Alice; it’s a sort of sport among them to laugh about their sister’s husband, in good fun.

It’s not your job to like him, Helen would say when she caught them. Eventually she relented, agreed, Sure, he’s not ideal, but isn’t everyone infuriating. And then she would eye them in the way that only she could eye them. It is your job to be his family, she’d say.

“For the children,” Alice says now, about the igloo.

“An experience,” Tess says.

Tess should not take this all so personally, says Martin. He thinks she takes lots of things too far. What does it matter, Josh? But Tess can’t help it. Josh does these things instead of helping with the children, cleaning up after lunch or dinner, noticing his wife’s recent descent into depression, making any effort at his job. He is not productive or responsible. And Tess has built a whole life around the idea that if she stops being productive and responsible, even for a second, she’ll die.

A muddled whiskey drink sits in a large pitcher on the thick wood counter, and Alice pours out one for each of them. “Holiday whiskey punch?”

Tess takes hers and thanks her, holds her arm again for no good reason. “Where’s Kate?”

Alice nods toward the living room, but Tess doesn’t move.

Kate hears them but she doesn’t go to greet them. She wants a few more minutes alone, quiet. She’s been working on the tree nearly since she and Josh and the kids got here, brought ornaments, most of them her mother’s—she was the only one who wanted what Tess called the “holiday debris” when they emptied her mother’s house. She thought she’d cry while she was hanging them but she hasn’t so far. She’s brought a fresh roll of garland she spent a whole evening making while Bea watched TV and the twins wrestled on the floor. They tried to staple the paper with her, but they ripped it and got frustrated and she was upset that the circles weren’t the way she liked them, so she turned on the TV and made the garland by herself.

Two weeks ago, she made Henry and Alice send her a picture of the tree. She told them it was to gauge the size to know how many lights to bring, but really, it was to prove they had gotten it. She knew better than to depend on Henry for too much.