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My throat closes. I take her face in both hands.

Above us, the sprig sways in the cold air from the open door, green and white, tied with red cord.

"Shop's still open," I say.

She laughs through her tears. "So it counts."

I smile. I feel it take over my whole face, the first real one in four years, and her breath catches.

"It counts. You have to mean it."

"I mean it," she says.

"So do I."

I kiss her under the mistletoe, in the open door of Lindgren's Toys, with the waltz playing in the window and the whole of Prospect Street watching. She grabs my flannel and kisses me back, up on her toes, and someone on the sidewalk whistles, and the carolers start "Deck the Halls," and I don't hear any of it.

When I lift my head, Dottie is standing beside the cider urn with a dish towel pressed to her mouth.

"Well," she says. "Look at that."

I look at the window. The horses go around and around, the train circles them, and every lit house glows gold.

Gran was right. Everybody can see it.

EPILOGUE

NOELLE: 5 YEARS LATER

"Again," Ingrid says from the stool at the wrap counter of Lindgren's Toys, both mittens flat on the counter beside the carousel.

It's six o'clock on Christmas Eve. The sign on the door says CLOSED, the overhead lights are off, and the last notes of "The Skaters' Waltz" drift through the dark shop while the six tin horses slow on their brass poles.

"Your daddy just wound it," I tell her.

"It stopped."

"It always stops."

My daughter turns and gives me a look of deep, four-year-old patience, her blond hair falling out of its braid, her cheeks still pink from the cold. "Then you wind it again, Mama. That's the point."

Behind her, Arch laughs. It's a real laugh, the kind that took me most of a year to get out of him. These days, I hear it every morning.

"She's got you," he says.

"She's got your whole speech memorized."

"It's a good speech." He lifts Ingrid off the stool with one arm and settles her on his hip. "Go ahead. It's your turn."

She leans over the counter and puts both hands on the key. She grunts and turns it, once, twice, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, and Arch reaches around her to help with the last few turns. Then she lets go, and the waltz starts again, bright and clear. The horses rise.

Ingrid claps. Dottie claps too, from her chair beside the register, where she's been sitting since five with her feet up and a cup of cider. She works three days a week now, and never Christmas Eve, but every Christmas Eve she comes in at close anyway.

Dottie smiles at our daughter. "Your namesake would've loved this.”

"She'd have said we let it run down too long between windings," Arch says.

"She would have," Dottie agrees.