“I don’t know, and I didn’t take any of the gifts they had for the Forgotten Angels . . .”

Thomas waited for more of a story, but nothing came.

“What about Sara’s?”

“I picked up her presents the other day. They said that sometimes—every now and then—a registered angel isn’t picked.”

“So Sara got picked but I didn’t?” Thomas asked. “Maybe Santa thinks I’ve been a bad boy this year. I knew I shouldn’t a snuck behind Mr. Sinclair’s house to steal his moonshine.”

“It isn’t funny,” Lynn said. “And it has nothing to do with Santa.”

He wouldn’t be so mean.

“I’m sorry, Thomas. I know that this hasn’t been the easiest year for you, not being able to play basketball and everything—”

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Are there a lot of these ‘Forgotten Angels’?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“So you think that if I had a stash of stuff, like clothes and shoes and games and toys and pretty much everything you can think of—you think that they could go to the Forgotten Angels?”

“I want you to get the gifts you asked for,” she said.

As she looked at him, with his still-groggy eyes and bed head, she didn’t know why a smile lit up his face.

“What?” she asked.

“Well, I was going to tell you eventually.”

“About what?”

“Maybe if we get the car started, you can bring me to school.”

Thomas kept smiling.

“Okay,” she told him. “But first we have to get a set of pliers. Then find the spare key for the car.”

The Only Thing

“Kevin.”

The moment his wife uttered his name, he knew.

Jenny had climbed out of bed in her usual laborious manner that always made him feel empathetic. Her struggle to catch her breath, to stand up, to move slowly across the darkened bedroom floor. This time he’d heard her and then heard the flush moments later, followed by his name.

And the way she said his name didn’t sound good.

“Yeah.”

But he already knew.

It’s time.

Of course, that was what he said every moment of every day. He was the child in the backseat asking, “Are we there yet?”

“I think something’s wrong.”

As he opened the bathroom door and his eyes adjusted to the light, Kevin knew. He didn’t have to see the tears in Jenny’s eyes. He’d heard them in her voice.

“I’m bleeding.”

She was thirty-four weeks pregnant. She was scheduled to go to the ob-gyn next week. At the doctor’s last suggestion, Jenny had started taking steroid shots to help the babies’ lung development in case . . .

In case of something like this.

This wasn’t supposed to happen for another month.

But life, as Kevin had discovered more and more recently, had a way of doing things on its own.

It can’t be now, not a day before Christmas Eve, not when there’s still so much to do . . .