The dining table was set in greens and reds. Facing the breast-heavy bird with its immaculately crisp skin, Kate realized that this was her first holiday dinner with her mother that felt the way she imagined a holiday dinner should feel—social, hearty, conventional and more than a little claustrophobic. Her mother had a world—close friends, friends who’d fly across the country to eat with her. Kate had nothing like this. Mary-Sue said for everyone to wait another ten minutes for their final guest. Then those ten minutes passed.

She asked Larry to say grace, and everybody joined hands. She clasped her mother’s bony, birdlike talon with one hand and B. M.’s leathery paw with the other. Larry and B. S. reached across the sixth empty seat.

“Let’s just pretend he’s here, in spirit,” said Mary-Sue.

The men hadn’t bought any gifts for Mary-Sue because she’d outlawed it. As Kate knew, this was how she kept her own presents in the spotlight. Like Wendy surrounded by her kowtowing Lost Boys. B. S. caressed the slow cooker Mary-Sue gave him, B. M. called Mary-Sue a mind reader because the hurricane lantern he got was just what he needed “for the airboat out in Shark Valley.” Larry planted a kiss on Mary-Sue’s lips when he peeled open the wrapper and found the back support pillow he’d been wanting for watching TV in bed. Kate accepted her portable breast-milk pump wordlessly, then she switched on the one news channel Mary-Sue didn’t object to. “No terrorism,” she’d barked. Luckily, because of the holiday, what came on were “human interest” stories—identity theft, mountain lions, and missing children.

“ . . . Brittany Ann Yamasato turned sixteen during the eight months she spent hiding in the Palo Alto fraternity house where her boyfriend, a junior at Stanford, lived. She had not been kidnapped, she told her parents. She lived there willingly. And to protect the young man from prosecution, she has refused to reveal his identity. As to why she finally decided to come home, she says it’s all due to, quote, ‘the Christmas propaganda’ she saw around her. All in all, it’s a bittersweet reunion for the Yamasato family tonight . . .”

As old photographs of Brittany Ann Yamasato flashed on the screen, Mary-Sue felt all choked up: Brittany in a pink sweatshirt, posing by a New York subway sign; Brittany eating lobster with her parents in Maine; Brittany on a class trip to Paris. She was an obliging subject, but she always smiled a frozen sort of smile. Was she happy? Possibly. Was she unhappy? Possibly. Her expression was uncannily, unfathomably Kate-like. She wondered if Kate saw the resemblance also—but people never do.