December 2: Twenty-Three

He's on your step at 8:52.

You know because you're watching from behind the curtain, coffee in both hands, like a woman in a nature documentary waiting for something large to come out of the trees. He's in a navy sweater today, the charcoal coat over it, and he has two cups from Sato's Bakehouse. He stands in the snow and reads the hours on the door like they're a contract.

You make him wait until nine exactly. It's petty. It feels wonderful.

"Morning," he says when you unlock it, and holds out one of the cups. "Oat milk latte, extra cinnamon. Josie says it's what you get."

"Josie is a traitor."

"Josie charged me eleven dollars for two coffees and told me if I hurt you she'd put me in a pie." He steps inside and stamps his shoes. "I liked her."

You take the latte, because you're not an idiot, and you hand him an apron.

It's green. It says WEATHERBY'S across the chest in red stitching, and under that, in smaller letters, ASK ME ABOUT OUR ELVES. Dewey's sister made a box of them in 1994 and nobody has ever been brave enough to throw them out.

Chase holds it up. Reads it. Looks at you.

"Open to close," you say sweetly. "Apron included."

He puts it on without a word. Over the eight-hundred-dollar sweater. It's too short for him and the strings barely meet behind his back, and he looks, somehow, devastating anyway, like a magazine shoot about rustic living. It's deeply unfair.

Dewey comes in at 9:10, sees him, and stops dead on the mat.

"Well," he says. "Ho ho ho."

The first job of December 2 is names.

It's a Weatherby's tradition: you buy a plain glass ball, and someone behind the counter letters your name on it in white paint with a brush thinner than an eyelash. Your mother was the best at it. You're second best. Dewey's hand shakes now, so he's retired, and stands at Chase's shoulder for the first one like a disappointed sensei.

The customer is a woman from Rutland who wants MADELINE on a red ball for her granddaughter's tree.

Chase looks at the brush. Looks at the ball. Takes a breath like he's going into a board meeting.

What comes out is MADELIИE. The N is backward. The E is a small white storm.

"It's charming," he tells the woman, without blinking. "Hand-lettered. You can see the human touch. Nobody else on her street will have one like it."

"That's true," the woman says, a little dazed. She's looking at his face, not the ball.

"Let me do you a second one, on the house, so she has a spare." He hands the brush to you. "My colleague is the artist. I'm just the face."

You letter MADELINE perfectly, and the woman buys both balls, a nativity set and a forty-dollar tin of Josie's shortbread that you didn't know you stocked. When she leaves, Dewey says, very quietly, "Son, that was criminal," and he says it with respect.

That's the whole day. Chase can't letter, can't find the tissue paper, can't work the old register and has to be shown the drawer trick three times. And he sells. He sells like breathing. He sells a two-hundred-dollar nutcracker to a man who came in for tape. He talks a college girl out of the cheap tin star and into one of Tilda's blown-glass icicles, and she thanks him. He learns everyone's name the first time. You watch him do it with a sinking feeling, because this is what he does for a living, and he's good at it, and he's in your house.

At two o'clock, a couple comes in holding hands.

They're maybe twenty-five, snow in their hair, a little shy. They just moved in together, they tell you, an apartment in Burlington with a radiator that clanks, and they want their first ornament. Their first one, together. They've been saving it for a real place.

"We want something we'll still like in fifty years," the girl says.

You open your mouth to show them the doves. Chase gets there first.

He doesn't show them the expensive case. He walks them down to the back corner, to the small things, and he takes down a little glass house. A cottage, no bigger than a walnut, with a red door and a light-catching window, one of Tilda's.

"Somebody told me once," he says, holding it up, "that the first ornament should be a house, so you always remember where you started."

The girl's eyes fill. The boy says, "Yeah. That one."

You stand there with a roll of tape in your hand and you think: Somebody told you that? Who?

Because it's what your grandfather used to say. Word for word.

At four, the bell rings and Noah Kimbrough ducks under it in his fire department jacket, all six-foot-two of him, blond and windburned and smiling at you the way he has since the tenth grade.

"Heard you hired a condo guy, Ava," he says.

"Heard you're still nosy."

Noah was your boyfriend for six years, from homecoming junior year to your first job in Burlington, and he's now the youngest fire chief Eastbrook has ever had, and every grandmother in town still asks when you two are getting back together. He's sweet. He's handsome in a way that sells calendars for the fire company every fall. He's also looking over your shoulder at Chase, who is looking back, and the temperature in the shop drops about ten degrees.

"Chief Kimbrough," Chase says pleasantly. "I've seen your calendar. Mr. March, right?"

"Mr. December," Noah says.

"Of course you are."

You step between them before anyone can say anything about hose lengths.

Later, around six, Chase's phone buzzes and his face changes. He takes it into the stockroom. You aren't eavesdropping. You're restocking tissue paper three feet from the door, which is different.

"No," you hear him say, low and hard. Nothing like the voice he uses on customers. "I said no. I'm handling it. Tell him I'm handling it."

When he comes out, the smile is right back on. "Assistant," he says. "Boston thinks I've been kidnapped by elves."

He lies well. You'll give him that.

You close up together at eight. Outside it's snowing again, big quiet flakes, and Main Street is strung with lights from lamppost to lamppost. He walks you to your own door, which is ridiculous, since it's twelve feet from his.

"Same time tomorrow, Ava?" he says.

"You're really doing this."

"I said I would." He pulls the apron over his head and hands it to you, folded. "Goodnight, Weatherby."

You go up to bed. You do not think about him. You think about him for two hours.

At 12:14 your phone buzzes on the pillow.

Day 2 of 24. Rate my first shift, one to ten. Be cruel, Weatherby. I can take it.