Christmas Day, Cindy and the Mallardson boy play House in the backyard, except their house is an old elm with a fallen branch like a lean-to, and their children are snowballs dolled up in tinsel scraps and knotted ribbon, and my brother Quinton is still on the couch, reeling from his girl—The Stylist, Greta called her in a nasally imitation, a bit too loudly from our bedroom last night—breaking his limp and crooning heart on Christmas Eve, and I've got to figure out how to get him on a plane back to California before Cindy gets used to a sad-eyed uncle with a head full of dirty limericks—There once was a girl from the Cod, who dreamed she'd been buggered by God—and so maybe we should've sprung for a dog this year, because we'd like Cindy to learn responsibility, since she doesn't have a brother whose couch she can sleep on when she's older and dumped, but I saw a Rottweiler tear into a girl just about Cindy's size when I was a boy about the Mallardson boy's size, and so there's a parental phobia for you, the kind you can mull over on Christmas Day, and though Greta's heard it before, she'll listen again because the eggnog's been flowing since nine o'clock, and she likes a nasty story after a few drinks—I can already see her red dimples and her eyes the texture of rubber—but before I can tell her about the dog and the way the little girl's wrist dangled like a dead tongue, the Mallardson boy—I know his name is Alastair, but I don't care to call a ten-year-old Alastair—well, he starts screaming because Cindy is smashing all the snowballs with a mittened fist, like, there goes little Frosty Junior and Polar Polly and Nat King Cole III, and I'm just watching from the bay window while Greta licks a whitish sheen off her upper lip and asks me what I'm staring at, and Quinton lifts his head for the first time in an hour—he likes to pretend he's asleep when he's in a state of emotional distress—and sidles over and starts up some kind of soliloquy about the curse of the suburbs, about how there's always a scream just waiting in the back of everyone's throats, and isn't that what so much fiction's about, that scream coming out and everyone being equally scared and embarrassed for themselves, and that guilt and shame is just about the only thing that keeps our hearts beating between the protracted deaths and the sudden, unexpected ones—there goes another infant snowball crushed into powdered viscera—and Quinton, shut up, is what I'm saying to him, because he's got a way of making his own self-serving cultural observations appear insightful when they're not, but he's not really talking to us; instead, he's talking at the no-longer-there face of the third-best woman he's ever known—The Stylist who slipped away on a red-eye, after Quinton made one too many comments about how nice it would be to have a backyard, how they'd never afford a backyard in California, and doesn't the Midwest just feel like home—and so I have more pity for him than I do the Mallardson boy, whose softness, I think, is its own kind of ruse, because he's wearing Cindy's coat, and she's wearing his, so if their children are snow and their house is a tree, why wouldn't the Mallardson boy be Cindy and she him, and I wouldn't put it past Cindy, who has her mother's smarts and my sensibilities, to be acting out precisely what she thinks the Mallardson boy would do were he in her role—were he himself, I'm saying—and the Mallardson boy is reacting in the way you'd expect any mother to react when watching her children swatted by the tiny hand of their father, but that's a bit too much to explain to Greta, beside me now at the bay window, too much before noon on Christmas, with Quinton bothering me for the phone to call The Stylist because he's got an idea for a movie or a TV show, and she knows people who know people, and if their relationship isn't romantic anymore, then it can at least stay professional—which, I understand, is how it started—but I'm holding my little brother back with a palm against his forehead, and Greta's face is somewhere between grin and grimace, and she reaches to put a hand against the window, and I can make out the ridges of her fingertips on the fogged glass, and Quinton is bawling now too, like the Mallardson boy, because he doesn't know The Stylist's number, and even if he did what would he say, and in a burst, Greta lunges out the back door to shake the Mallardson boy into silence, grips the collar of his sweater with one trembling hand while the other holds our red-dimpled child and tells her, No, you don't have to play House anymore, and when she walks back through the door with Cindy by her side, still in the Mallardson boy's coat, I say to all of them, as though it's a Christmas toast, Let's go to the pound.


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