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Dez had bought the tree that morning at a lot on Hudson Street where the trees stood in ranks like polite soldiers and the salesman wore a knit hat with a pompom the size of a grapefruit. Dez had not intended to buy a giant. He had intended, as he told himself while walking there with his hands in his pockets and his breath making little clouds, to buy something modest. Something that would fit. Something that would not require scissors and threats about bangs.
But then he had seen it.
It stood at the back of the lot, slightly apart from the others, taller than the rest by a head and then some, its branches thick and uneven in a way that looked less like negligence and more like generosity. When Dez touched it, needles clung to his sleeve. The smell rose up—green, sharp, alive—and for a second the city noise fell away and he was twelve again in a different apartment in a different borough, watching his mother argue with a ceiling that refused to accommodate joy.
That was the hidden reason, the one he had not yet told Wren or Gus, the one that sat under his ribs like a second heart: his mother had always bought trees that were too big. Not out of carelessness. Out of belief. She used to say that a small tree was a compromise with the year, and she refused to compromise with December. When Dez was small they lived in a walk-up in Queens where the living room ceiling was low and the radiators clanked like percussion, and every year the tree arrived like a guest who had not measured the doorway. His father would sigh. His mother would laugh. They would cut the top, or tilt it, or—one memorable year—saw a hole in the plaster and call it a skylight for angels. Then his father left, and the trees got smaller for a while because money got smaller, and then his mother got sick the winter Dez turned nineteen, and the last tree she bought was a little tabletop fir that sat on the kitchen counter beside her medicine bottles, and she had looked at it with an apology in her eyes that Dez had never forgiven the universe for.
She died in February. The little tree stayed up until March because Dez could not bring himself to take it down. When he finally did, he put the ornaments in a cardboard box labeled, in her handwriting, KEEP, and he put the box in a closet, and he put the closet out of his mind for years.
Until this morning.
Until Hudson Street.