She took the box out of his hands. He let her. She turned and dropped it squarely on top of Dot's cart, where it settled among its forty sisters with a soft cardboard thump. Dot raised one penciled eyebrow and said nothing, which was a kindness.
Then Gina shifted her shopping bags to her other hand, hooked her free arm through his — through the navy wool of his peacoat, right at the elbow, as if she had been doing it for years — and turned him bodily toward the escalator. He stumbled for one step and then fell into rhythm beside her, and by the time they reached the top of the moving stairs they were both laughing, the helpless, shoulder-shaking kind of laughing that has nothing to do with whether anything is actually funny, the kind that happens when two strangers have just seen each other being ridiculous and have decided, without discussing it, to be ridiculous together.
"Then you're buying me cocoa."
*
The Evergreen Room occupied most of the seventh floor of Halloran Brothers, and in December it was the closest thing Chicago had to a cathedral that served chicken pot pie. A tree rose from the center of the room through an open atrium, forty feet of Douglas fir hung with ten thousand lights and a thousand ornaments, and around it the tables were set with white linen and little brass lamps with green shades. The line to get in usually ran past the lingerie department. Gina had stood in it every year of her childhood, holding her father's hand, and she was preparing to explain to the man beside her that they would be waiting at least forty-five minutes when the hostess, a tall girl with a ponytail and a sprig of holly behind her ear, looked up, saw him, and said, "Mr. Ellsworth! Table for two?"
Gina turned slowly and looked at him.
"I come here for lunch sometimes," he said. "My office is on LaSalle."
"You come here enough that they know your name."
"I tip well," he said, and pushed his glasses up his nose, and Gina filed that away without yet knowing what she was filing.