*
On Friday morning, at eight-forty, twenty minutes before Halloran Brothers opened its doors to the public, Graham Ellsworth was standing outside the employee entrance on Wabash Avenue in the snow, holding two cups of coffee and a box of doughnuts from the Greek place on Randolph, waiting for Dot.
He had been there on Wednesday and Thursday too, and he had learned three things. First, that Dot's full name was Dorothy Wierzbicki, that she had worked on the toy floor at Halloran's since the Eisenhower administration, and that she took her coffee with two sugars and a splash of milk. Second, that Halloran's received no more shipments of the Starlight Sweetheart doll and would receive none before Christmas, because the factory in Taiwan had stopped answering telephone calls from anyone in the continental United States. And third, that occasionally — rarely, but occasionally — a customer who had put a doll on layaway in October would fail to make the final payment, and the layaway would be canceled, and the doll would be returned to stock.
"Not to you," Dot had said on Wednesday, very kindly, "to stock. Store policy. It goes back on the floor at opening, first come, first served. I can't hold it for you, honey. I'd lose my job, and I've got two years till my pension."
"I understand," Graham had said, and thanked her, and come back on Thursday anyway, and then again on Friday with doughnuts, not because he thought he could bribe her — he had met Dot; he knew better — but because it seemed like the only thing left to do.
The door opened. Dot came out in a parka over her red vest, holding a cigarette she had not lit yet. She looked at him. She looked at the doughnuts. She sighed a long, enormous, Polish-grandmother sigh.
"You're the sweater boy," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."