"People who want their gingerbread house to remain standing," said Graham, "past nine p.m."
The tree stood by the front window, where they had left it, and he had decorated it — sometime in the past twenty-four hours, by himself — with a single strand of white lights and a box of plain red glass balls from the hardware store, and nothing else. It looked like the tree in an insurance commercial. It was, Gina thought, the most heartbreaking thing she had ever seen, and she resolved to bring him ornaments.
They built. Gina built fast and with confidence, the way she did everything, squeezing icing along the edges of her walls in thick generous ropes, slapping the roof on, pressing gumdrops into the icing in a riot of color. She talked the whole time. She told him about the agency, about her cousin Donna who had four kids and a husband who sold aluminum siding and an opinion about everything, about Aunt Philomena's baccalà and the Christmas Eve when it had given Uncle Carmine such indigestion that he'd had to lie down on the floor of the vestibule at Midnight Mass. Graham laughed in the right places and did not talk much, and measured his eaves.
By eight-fifteen, Gina's house was finished. It was a cheerful, lopsided cottage with a licorice door and a roof shingled in cinnamon candies and a little gumdrop snowman out front, and she sat back and admired it and felt very pleased with herself.
By eight-twenty, the roof had begun to slide.
It slid slowly at first, a quarter of an inch, then a half, the thick ropes of icing that she had been so proud of failing under the weight of the candy. She grabbed for it. The left wall buckled. She grabbed for the left wall. The right wall leaned out, gracefully, like a ballerina taking a bow, and kept leaning, and the whole house came apart in her hands in a soft, sticky collapse of gingerbread and gumdrops, and the snowman rolled off the cookie sheet and across the table and onto the floor.
There was a silence.
Graham's house stood across from hers, perfectly square, its eaves perfectly measured, its roof perfectly level, a small brown monument to the triumph of structural engineering. He had piped tiny icicles along the gutters. He had made a chimney.