Watching them laugh and hug each other, trading candy from their stockings, I wonder if their ability to carry on being merry is because Hall gave them so much of himself. They’ve already soaked up all the holiday cheer they need.

There’s one more gift on my lap, rectangular, weighing about as much as a book. To Bettie. Always your Hall.

My hands hesitate before my brain tunes out all the noise and I’m tearing it open without thinking, opening not a book but a journal, the first two pages filled with his elegant, tidy script.

I snap the book shut, heart racing.

Then open it back up again to the first page.

One of a Kind

One’s edges need not be rounded

for them to be a good shape

Behold, the paper snowflake—

It is perfect!

And has so many points to make

I reread it, not comprehending what exactly it is that I’m seeing right away. Poetry? I’ve never heard him express an interest in poetry. There are only two finished poems in here, all the rest blank or occupied by rhyming word banks. He’d gotten a few other poems under way, then abandoned them, lines crossed out, frustrated inkblots leaking between pages.

“Bettie, did you make these?” Kaia’s voice grabs my attention. She’s holding up a colorful fan of papers. We should do something about all those cans of paint in the basement, one reads. Then another: Divorce is very sad. It might help you to know that we never liked him.

“Yeah . . .” I’m tense for a moment, but then she grins.

“I love them.”

Mom is beside herself with enthusiasm in a way that only a mother whose child presents them with colorful doodles on craft paper could be. “Oh my gosh!” she cries. “You used to draw these when you were little! Remember, Jim?” She pokes on a pair of reading glasses to examine hers. “You let my birds pair off into cliques while I was in Atlantic City and I won’t forget it.” She frowns. “I don’t remember you ever having birds. Bettie, when did you ask me to watch your birds?”

Athena laughs, the sparkly ink on hers flashing in the early light. Her illustration is of two pineapples riding a skateboard past a toxic waste plant. Please don’t make me choose what we eat for dinner. “Look, Sean. It’s our relationship in a nutshell.”

Felix shows his to Marilou: I didn’t understand The Goldfinch.

“Neither did I, to be honest,” Marilou muses. Baby Adrian sticks a red ribbon to her cheek, and she blows raspberries into his palm. He giggles wildly.

There are no duplicates, so my family starts passing their cards around, reading the ones they didn’t get.

Mom’s wide blue eyes are confused. “It’s hard to find episodes of The Mentalist anywhere. What? I don’t get it.”

“The randomness is the joke,” Kaia informs her. I cover my face with my hands and smother a laugh. “It’s supposed to be weird.”