"Done."
They shook. Augie held her hand a moment longer and said something to her in a low voice that Graham couldn't hear, and Gina nodded and looked at the ground, and then Augie went into the trailer and came back with a wreath, and Gina turned around and walked back to Graham carrying it, and her eyes were very bright.
"I win," she said.
"You win," said Graham. "But we're not getting that tree home on the bus."
They did not get it home on the bus. They got it home in the back of Augie's nephew's pickup truck, which took them first to Graham's apartment on Belden Avenue in Lincoln Park, a third-floor walk-up in an old brownstone that turned out to be completely bare of decoration of any kind, because Graham had never once in his adult life bought a Christmas tree.
"Never?" said Gina, standing in his living room with snow melting off her boots onto his very clean hardwood floor.
"I didn't see the point. Christmas was always somewhere else." He was standing in the doorway, holding the top end of the tree while Augie's nephew held the bottom, looking around his own apartment as if he'd never seen it before. "Where do you think it should go?"
"By the window," said Gina, "so people on the street can see it."