Morris receives his Christmas card nearly two weeks after what happened. The note from his son, Toby, says that work with the Tibetan monk is going well; it says the spirit of Christmas is still with him. What does it mean, still? Christmas hadn’t come yet for Toby when he wrote the card, and would not come. When Toby’s aunt, Morris’s sister, received her card, she said she thought of the Dalai Lama padding barefoot around his temple and about his devotees who loved him better than Jesus. The divorced mother’s card said that turkey was the only meat Toby missed. Toby’s mother is almost sure that, in spite of being a Catholic genetically, her son had gone native.
Morris’s card is unsigned, and it ends midsentence. Since the other cards were finished, he figures he was most likely below the mother and the aunt on the list of people Toby would write to. He won’t let that trouble him under the circumstances. But the card, sent anyhow and displayed on the mantel, does trouble Morris. It won’t let him rest—not while he sits on the couch, his feet made of dog; not when he goes out walking past the defunct smokestacks of the furniture factory and the wintered-over marsh.
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