She did it the way her father had taught her. She called the stockrooms first, every one she could think of: Carson's, Wieboldt's, Goldblatt's, Sears on State, the Venture in Burbank, the Kmart on Cicero, the big new toy warehouse out in Niles with the giraffe on the sign. She talked to stock boys and assistant managers and one very sympathetic woman in receiving at a store in Joliet. She asked when the trucks were coming in. The trucks were not coming in. The factory in Taiwan was not answering the phone. Somebody in Oak Brook had heard a rumor about a shipment in Milwaukee, which turned out to be tube socks.
By four o'clock she had nothing. By five o'clock she was on the Clark Street bus to Lincoln Park with a shopping bag full of her mother's old Christmas ornaments — the glass birds with the spun-glass tails, the felt angel she had made in second grade, the hand-blown red-and-gold balls her grandmother had brought from Palermo in 1921, wrapped in newspaper — because she had promised Graham she would rescue his insurance-commercial tree, and because she did not want to be alone, and because she wanted to tell him about her terrible day and have him say something calm and lawyerly about it, and because she wanted him to hold her.
He buzzed her up. He opened the door in his forest-green sweater and his reading socks, and his face lit up when he saw her, and then something flickered behind it.
"You're early," he said.
"I'm not early. I'm a woman who's been on a bus for forty minutes with an ornament from Palermo in her lap. Take this." She handed him the shopping bag. "Careful. Those birds are older than you."
He took it and turned toward the living room. She shrugged off her burgundy coat and, out of long Bridgeport habit — at her mother's house you did not throw a coat on a chair, you hung it up or you heard about it — she opened the hall closet to hang it there.
The box was on the shelf above the coats.
It was wrapped in green-and-gold Halloran's paper, but it was a shape she would have known in her sleep, a shape she had been chasing all day across the whole Chicagoland area, the exact dimensions of a Starlight Sweetheart doll. And taped under the ribbon was a little white card that said, in careful Palmer-method script, HOLD — ELLSWORTH.