"Well," she said, "then I guess you'd better go get them back."
*
There was no answer at the apartment on Belden Avenue. Gina leaned on the buzzer for two full minutes. A neighbor coming out with a laundry bag told her that the gentleman on the third floor had left an hour ago carrying a shopping bag and a wrapped present, headed for the bus.
Which bus, Gina did not need to ask.
She took a cab — the first cab she had taken in a year, a ruinous extravagance, nineteen dollars plus tip — all the way down Lake Shore Drive and across on Thirty-first Street, and she made the driver go past the bakery where the Ferraros were staying, just in case, and then up Lowe Avenue to her mother's house, a narrow brick bungalow with a concrete Virgin Mary in the front yard wearing a little cap of snow.
There were footprints on the front walk. Big ones, a man's size eleven, going up the steps and not coming back down.
Gina let herself in the front door.
The house smelled the way it had smelled every Christmas Eve of her life: garlic and lemon and frying smelts, anise from the pizzelle, the sharp clean brine of clams in a bucket in the sink. The radio in the kitchen was playing Christmas carols. And at the end of the hallway, through the kitchen doorway, she could see her mother at the stove in her apron, and Aunt Philomena at the counter flouring calamari, and her brother Vince in his clerical collar leaning against the refrigerator eating a pizzella and laughing at something.