“Actually, I do.” She looked serious for a moment. “Your mother is a force of nature. I’m just glad she’s usually on my side. Call me when you and your mother are coming over tomorrow to inspect the boxes. Matt’s back from North Carolina. He and I can help.”

My errand at the grocery store didn’t take long. I was picking up supplies for tomorrow night’s secret Christmas dinner. Cans of refrigerator rolls. Cranberries. Cran-apple juice for the boys to drink—we always served it on festive occasions so they would feel included when we lifted glasses of red wine for toasts. I pondered getting some ice cream, a popular favorite with the boys and Michael. But I wasn’t sure there would be room in the tiny freezer compartment of the basement apartment’s ancient toy-sized refrigerator for both the ice cream and an ice cube tray.

The store was surprisingly crowded for such a late hour. Some of the people were piling their baskets high with the makings of their own Christmas dinners—turkeys, geese, ham, ribs, pork roasts, potatoes and sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberries, pies, premade pie shells, cans of pumpkin, bags of flour and sugar—looking at other people’s carts was giving me an appetite. And just walking down the spice aisles and seeing people filling their carts with cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, and other spices made me happy.

In the housewares aisle, I convinced a young, recently married Shiffley that no, a fancy electric mixer would not be the perfect present for his wife and suggested he contact Rose Noire, who could put together a deluxe basket of luxurious foods and wonderfully scented sachets, lotions, and potpourris. And then I ended up giving her card to several other present-seeking husbands and boyfriends who had been eavesdropping on our conversation. Tomorrow, I knew, would be one of her busiest days of the year, as the growing number of men who waited till the last minute to start looking for presents for their wives and girlfriends descended on her en masse, all begging for special gift baskets. A good thing she started making up the special baskets before Thanksgiving, though this year business had been going so well that several times in the last month she’d enlisted the rest of the household, even the boys, for several intense evenings of cutting up and wrapping soap, mixing and bagging potpourri, using rubber stamps to create labels, and doing all the other small tasks needed to get her supplies back to a good level.