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Me: What emergency?

Noelle: Your house is sad.

I stare at the screen.

Me: My house is not sad.

Noelle: Maverick.

It’s strange seeing my name from her.

I don’t know why.

Noelle: You had one wreath.

Me: That’s sufficient.

Noelle: For a funeral home?

I rub a hand over my mouth.

Me: Don’t go overboard.

Noelle: Define overboard.

I should call her.

I should tell her that I always have Joy from Holly Holidays come and handle the decorations every year. Tastefully. White lights and greenery. Nothing excessive.

She usually comes the first week of December with a van and all the supplies. By the time I come home from work, the house looks like a page from a catalog. Then she comes back the second week of January and takes it all away again, and it’s as though Christmas never happened.

It’s efficient. It’s easy.

Nobody has to remember anything. Because I know if left to myself, I’d forget something. Christmas was never a big deal in my house growing up. And Naomi never did much when we were married. Except the presents. She always went overboard with the presents. For herself, mostly.

Me: Nothing permanent.

She sends me a Santa emoji. I have no idea what that means. I think of Bryant, leaning back in that creaking chair, grinning at me. Whatever you say, Santa. I still don’t know what he meant by that either. I’m beginning to suspect I’m the only one who doesn’t.

Two days later, Dottie sends me a photograph of my foyer.

There is garland on the staircase, red ribbon, lights, some kind of miniature Christmas village on the entry table, and three stockings hanging from the fireplace, visible through the doorway.

Not white lights. Colored ones. Big, old-fashioned bulbs in red and green and blue and orange, wound all the way up the banister and around the newel post. The garland isn’t the tidy, wired kind the decorator uses. It’s fuller. Messier. There are pinecones tucked into it, and what looks like cinnamon sticks tied with twine.

The village has a tiny church with a lit steeple, a skating pond made out of a hand mirror, and a ceramic train station. A plastic stegosaurus is standing in the middle of the town square, towering over the townspeople like it’s about to stage an invasion.

I know without asking whose idea that was.

I zoom in on the stockings.

Shiloh. Noelle. Maverick.

The names are spelled out across the cuffs in glitter glue, the letters fat and wobbly and leaning into each other. The S in Shiloh is backward. Mine runs out of room at the end, so the K is squeezed in sideways.

Someone held his hand while he did it. I can tell by the way the letters start out steady and get wilder as they go, like at some point she let go and let him finish on his own.

I stare at my name.