"I feel ridiculous."
"He'd have loved this," said Gina. "He'd have loved you. He'd have given you so much grief." She stood on her toes and kissed him, carefully, on the small patch of cheek between the beard and the glasses. "Go on, Santa. Don't fall down."
He did not fall down. He was, to everyone's astonishment including his own, a wonderful Santa. His ho-ho-ho sounded, Vince said, like a man reading it off a deposition transcript, but it didn't matter, because he listened. Every child who climbed into his lap, he listened to as if they were the only child in Chicago, with his head tipped down toward them and his hands folded on his couch-cushion stomach, nodding gravely. He asked follow-up questions. He told a shy little girl who wanted a pony that he had once known a pony who lived in Barrington, and that it was very nice but did not like carrots, only apples. The children adored him. The mothers adored him. Mrs. Lombardo, who did not adore anyone, watched him for half an hour from beside the coffee urn and then turned to Rosemary and said, "That one, Rosemary. That one, you keep."
The last child in line was a little girl named Rosalie Ferraro.
Gina knew her a little, the way you knew everyone in Bridgeport — knew she was six, knew she was in first grade at St. Barbara's, knew her mother Theresa was a waitress at the Ramova Grill on Halsted and had raised her alone since Rosalie was a baby. And she knew, because everybody knew, because it had been the only thing anyone talked about after Mass for two weeks, that on the sixth of December there had been a fire in the three-flat on Lowe Avenue where the Ferraros lived. Bad wiring on the first floor. Nobody hurt, thank God, thank St. Barbara and the Chicago Fire Department, but the building was gone, and the Ferraros had come out into the snow at four in the morning in their nightgowns with nothing, not one thing, and they were staying now with Theresa's mother in two small rooms over the bakery on Thirty-first Street.
Rosalie climbed into Santa's lap in a borrowed dress that was too big for her and a pair of donated patent leather shoes. She had dark eyes and dark bangs and a solemn, businesslike manner, and she did not smile at Santa. She studied him.
"You're not the real Santa," she said.
Gina, standing by the cookie table, froze. Across the room, Vince froze. Graham did not.