Graham wrapped both hands around the paper cup. He looked at it for a long time.
"My parents divorced when I was eight," he said.
Gina didn't say anything. She had the good sense, for once, to just let a thing be.
"It was 1964. It was very messy and very expensive, and both of my parents were lawyers, which is like two scorpions getting divorced. And the custody agreement — my father drafted it, so it was airtight — said that I would spend Christmas Eve with him at his apartment on Lake Shore Drive and Christmas Day with my mother in Winnetka. Every year. Alternating nothing. Very fair. Very precise." He turned the cup. "And so every year, from when I was eight until I went to college, I had two Christmases. And my parents — I don't think they meant to do it. I really don't. But they competed. Over the presents. Over me. My father would get me a chemistry set, and my mother would hear about it from my nanny and get me a bigger chemistry set. My mother got me a pony one year. A pony. In Winnetka. It lived at a stable in Barrington, and I saw it maybe four times, and my father found out and the next year he got me a sailboat."
"A sailboat," Gina said faintly.
"A small one. Still. When I was eleven, they both got me the exact same bicycle. A red bicycle with a banana seat and streamers on the handlebars, the same model, the same everything, because my nanny had told them both what I wanted. And they each found out about the other one, and they both refused to return theirs. So I had two identical red bicycles. One at each house. I rode the one at my father's on weekends and the one at my mother's during the week, and every time I got on either one I thought about how they had each spent the whole Christmas season trying to beat each other, and how I was the scoreboard."
The stove ticked. Someone outside shrieked with laughter on the ice.
"So that's why taxes," Gina said quietly.