It came around the corner of aisle nine with a squeak of wheels — a flat, gray, utilitarian cart, the kind used in stockrooms, stacked chest-high with pink-and-silver boxes. Identical pink-and-silver boxes. Dozens of butterscotch dolls stared out from dozens of cellophane windows, a small serene army of them. Pushing the cart was a woman in her fifties in a red Halloran's vest, with reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck, a pin on her lapel that said ASK ME! I'M DOT, and the comfortable, unhurried expression of someone who had worked thirty Christmases on this floor and had seen absolutely everything.
She took in the two of them — the burgundy coat and the navy peacoat, the joined hands on the single box, the faces inches apart — and her mouth twitched.
"We just got forty more."
There was a very long moment.
Gina let go of the box. She did it all at once, the way you let go of a hot pan, and stepped back, and felt her face go warm from her collar to her hairline, so warm it was a wonder the snow on her shoulders didn't steam. The blush she had put on that morning was nothing compared to the blush she had now.
"Well. That's humiliating."
The man, left holding the doll alone, looked down at it as though he had no idea how it had gotten into his hands. Then he looked at the cart. Then at her. He reached up with one finger and pushed his glasses higher on his nose, a small, sheepish, utterly involuntary gesture, and Gina would learn later — much later, after it mattered — that he did it every single time he was about to tell the truth or was failing to tell a lie.
"Confession. No sister either."
Something happened in Gina's chest then that she did not have a name for. Later she would try to describe it to her cousin Donna over the phone and would end up saying "it was like when the Cubs actually score," which Donna said didn't help at all. It was a kind of bright, startled lift, as if a window had been thrown open in a room she hadn't realized was stuffy.