Page 2

"You were about to say something about the name."

"I was about to say it suits you."

"It doesn't. My mother used to like Christmas." I take my hand back. "Where do you want me?"

He looks at me a beat too long again. Then he tips his head toward the back of the shop. "Wrap counter."

I shrug out of my coat and hang it on a hook by the register. That's when I notice another brass hook, screwed into the inside of the door frame, up high, empty.

"What goes on that hook?"

He glances up at it. "Something of my grandmother's. It goes up tomorrow."

He doesn't say anything else, so I don't ask.

The shop is long and narrow, older than anything else I've seen on Prospect, with a pressed-tin ceiling and wood floors worn pale down the center aisle where more than sixty years of kids have walked. Shelves climb both walls. Wooden trains. Dolls in boxes with cellophane windows. A whole row of snow globes, each one with its own tiny town inside.

The wrap counter runs along the back wall. Rolls of paper hang on wooden dowels above it. Red plaid, green stripe, a white one with silver snowflakes, brown kraft. Below them sit scissors on a nail, tape guns, a box of tags, and two spools mounted on pegs. One holds wide satin ribbon. The other holds waxed red cord, the thin twisted kind.

I stop.

On the walk up from my cousin Shay's apartment, I passed a lamppost with a sprig of mistletoe tied to it. Green leaves, white berries, knotted on with red cord.

This red cord.

Half the town probably buys the same spool. I set my bag under the counter.

A hand-painted sign hangs over the dowels. FREE GIFT WRAPPING SINCE 1962. The letters have been touched up more than once.

"My grandmother's idea," Arch says from behind me. "Nobody leaves without a bow."

"Nobody?"

"Not in sixty-four years."

"That's a lot of bows."

"You'd better be fast, then."

I'm turning my head to tell him I'm very fast when my eyes catch on something above the paper rolls, and that's when I see the carousel.

It sits on the highest shelf behind the counter, where no one could get it down without a step stool. It's tin, painted red and gold, with a striped canopy and a ring of horses frozen mid-gallop on their brass poles. A key sticks out of the base. A small card leans against it, and written in the same black marker as the window sign are the words, NOT FOR SALE.

"That's beautiful," I say before I can stop myself.

Arch looks up at it. Then he looks somewhere else.

"It's old," he says.

The bell over the door jangles, and the first customers of the morning come in stamping snow off their boots.

By 9:15, there's a line at my counter. The woman at the register at the front of the shop—a gray-haired lady in a reindeer sweater who calls Arch "honey" and me "the new girl"—tells everyone who'll listen that it's Small Business Saturday and the whole town is out.

She's right. They come in families. They come in pairs. A grandfather buys a wooden fire truck and stands at my counter telling me about the one he had in 1971 while I fold the corners.

I'm good at this. I wrapped at a department store in Aurora for two Christmases, and before that I wrapped for my aunt's whole family every year, because somebody had to and I was the one who didn't mind. Square the box. Measure the paper twice. Crease the edges with a thumbnail. Ribbon, cord, a tag in the customer's handwriting, never mine.

I've wrapped a lot of presents. I don't open many.