Isabelle watches her father go. “I am the Lord of the Dancing Dee,” she sings quietly, finishing the tune her father has begun in the way she always used to, with the words all wrong. She looks beyond her father, beyond the stump of the apple tree, and across the street to where smoke is threading its way from Mr. Sullivan’s old chimney. The Dunlaps’ chimney, she corrects herself. She will have to start thinking of it as the Dunlaps’. She wonders what their Christmas is like, what the two of them are doing over there. Tomorrow, she thinks. Maybe tomorrow she will go over herself and say hello.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people for their help along the way in the writing of December.

Thanks go, of course, to Amanda Urban and Jordan Pavlin for believing in the book and in me, and thanks also to Leslie Levine.

Enormous thanks go to the thoughtful early readers whose feedback was invaluable: Mary Jo and Stephen Foley, Hartford Gongaware, Geoffrey Wolff, and, last but certainly not least, Richard Trenner.

I am endlessly grateful to Michelle Latiolais, without whose constant encouragement, support, wisdom, and friendship this book would not have been written.

And, of course, thanks and love always to my parents and my sisters, and to Adin and Mona.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop was born and raised in New York City. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001 with a B.A. in English and American Literature and Language. In 2004 she received her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, and she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship for the 2004–5 academic year. She is the author of the novel Fireworks, and has published stories in Wind, the Evansville Review, the Missouri Review, Red Rock Review, and the Indiana Review. Currently, she is living and writing in Savannah, Georgia.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH HARTLEY WINTHROP

ALSO BY ELIZABETH HARTLEY WINTHROP

Fireworks

COPYRIGHT

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth H. Winthrop

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winthrop, Elizabeth Hartley, [date]

December/Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop.—1st ed.

p.                            cm.

1. Mute persons—Fiction. 2. Sick children—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3623.I7D43 2008

813'.6—dc22

2007037095

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26956-0

v3.0