lined with solid old houses and tall, naked shade trees. Most of the houses had strings of big, conical multicolored bulbs running along their eaves and in the trees. Charlie slowed when he saw a house with tiny points of white light draped around its frame. As he pulled over toward the curb he overshot his mark and hit it with a solid jolt, lurching upward and halfway onto someone’s snowy lawn.
“Fuck! Spilled. Sorry.” Pete halfheartedly wiped at his lap with the sleeve of his sport jacket. “Wasn’t much left anyway.”
“Couldn’t see where the damn curb was,” Charlie said, a little embarrassed. “All this fucking snow.”
“You want to get down off the curb or just leave it like this? It’s Christmas Eve; nobody’s gonna fuck with it.”
“Let’s leave it like this. I don’t plan to be here long anyway.”
Pete was already scraping out white lines on the cover of a brand-new Rand McNally road atlas. “You going to join me before we go in?”
He almost said no, but he was feeling a little drunk and he didn’t want to slur in front of Melissa and Spencer. “Sure.”
He regretted it at the very first snort. After the initial burn in his nose the feel of the syrupy, bitter saliva running down the back of his throat nearly made him gag, but his grogginess was already beginning to dissipate as he climbed out of the Lincoln.
They walked around the east side of the house toward the back because Pete wanted to sneak a look into the dining room before they went inside. Charlie looked around the familiar backyard, feeling like a ghost in the feeble orange and purple light. It was so quiet he thought he could hear the snowflakes hitting the tops of the drifts. They turned the corner onto the west side of the house, where a faint yellow light shone through the dining room window.
“This is gonna be great,” Pete whispered, loudly enough to be heard fifteen feet away where Charlie stood watching him. Pete was on tiptoe, looking in at the last of the Christmas dinner. “They’re on dessert. Nobody’s talking. The kids are all pouting.”
“I should leave.”
“Too late. You’re in. You can’t let me go in there and tell your kids you were here and wouldn’t see ’em. Come on.” He dropped down and motioned for Charlie to follow him to the front of the house.
They climbed the porch steps and Pete opened the unlocked front door. Charlie stopped to scrape most of the snow off his shoes on the mat as Pete walked in, swaggering toward the dining room, clomping his wet boots across the solid oak floor, detouring for a brief hop to track snow and mud on a pristine, cream-colored couch. “Merry fucking Christmas!” he called out.
Charlie followed cautiously, several yards behind Pete, ready to bolt at the first sign of violence. Pete burst ahead of him into the dining room and held the door open. Charlie stood back, peering in around him from behind. The dark green wallpaper drained most of the light out of the room. Dottie sat silently at one end of the long table opposite her husband, and scattered around the table were five sleepy, cranky grandchildren, two women in early middle age, and a single, pudgy son-in-law, the only moving element in the tableau as his fork moved frantically back and forth from his pie plate to his mouth. The table was covered with half-empty platters: turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans. Of the three pies in the center of the table, only one had been cut into, and no one but Sarabeth’s husband had taken any.
“Hey, who died?” Pete yelled.
There was no response. Charlie shrank further behind Pete, considering a last-minute retreat. No one seemed to have noticed him yet. He caught a glimpse of Melissa, seated next to Dottie at the far end of the overladen dinner table. Was she six now? No, seven.
“It’s the silent treatment, Charlie.”
The mention of his name didn’t evoke any response from the adults at the table, but