He looked at her, startled, and then he smiled a little.
"That's why taxes. Nobody fights over the tax code. They just obey it, or they don't, and either way it's very calm." He took a sip of coffee. "And this year — my mother's in Aspen with her husband. My father's in Palm Beach with his. With his wife. His third. She's nice; she's younger than me. And I'm thirty, and I don't have a Christmas Eve or a Christmas Day anymore, I just have a December twenty-fifth, and I was going to spend it in my apartment watching the Yule Log on channel nine and eating Chinese food from the place on Clark."
"Graham—"
"And then I saw that woman on the news. The one in Schaumburg, in the parking lot. Crying because she couldn't get the doll. And I thought—" He stopped. Pushed his glasses up. Gina watched him do it and something tugged in her, some thread. "I thought, I'd like to have it. Just once. The thing everybody wants. Not to keep. I don't want a doll. I just thought, if I had it, then sooner or later someone would need it. And I'd be the person who had it. I'd be the guy who could just — hand it to somebody and fix their Christmas. I'd figure out who it was for later." He laughed, without much humor. "Which, now that I hear myself say it out loud, is exactly how my parents approached me."
Gina sat with that for a moment.
Then she reached over and took his coffee out of his hands and set it on the bench, and took both of his hands in both of hers. His fingers were freezing. She rubbed them between her gloved palms the way her father used to rub hers on the bench at McGuane Park, briskly, without any sentiment at all, just getting the blood going.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"I know."