"She worked the perfume counter at a department store in Midtown," he said. "Came home smelling like ten different women. Used to spray me with the tester bottles when I was little so I'd 'appreciate complexity.' I smelled like a garden party until middle school."
Wren laughed, soft and real. "That explains your taste in cologne. Which is to say: none."
"I appreciate complexity now without the misting." He turned his mug in his hands. "Dad left when I was fourteen. She didn't make the trees smaller right away. She made them louder. More lights. More tinsel. One year she put a revolving stand underneath so the whole thing spun like a department-store display. We ate dinner watching it go around and around. She said motion was proof of life."
Wren's eyes shone in a way that was not quite tears and not quite not. "She sounds like someone I'd have liked."
"She would've liked you," Dez said, and then, because that sentence was too close to other sentences he had not said, he added quickly, "She liked anyone who argued with me. Said it built character."
"I do argue with you."
"Constantly."
"It's a public service."