“Hmm,” said Mr. Zalumis, and he handed her a little bag of candied peanuts. Mr. Zalumis had inherited the peanut stand thirty years ago from his father, Old Mr. Zalumis, and the secret recipe for peanut brittle, containing a certain amount of coconut. Now Mr. Zalumis himself was old, with tangled eyebrows and a prickly, white stubble. He wore little round wire spectacles, a bowler hat, and red suspenders holding his pants up too high. But it wasn’t a costume; Mr. Zalumis just always dressed like that.

“She tried to give me a monkey,” Mr. Zalumis said. “The monkey had a little red suit and a little red hat with a gold band. He had wore all the hair off his tail. ‘Hell, lady,’ I told her, ‘I don’t want no damn monkey.’ That woman thinks she can run this whole town.”

They watched Lucille click the telephone off and slide it into a little holster on her belt and head off down the street.

“She’s wrong about that buggy, though,” said Mr. Zalumis. “I saw that buggy going down Dawson. Pretty thing, wheels just as high, and a little bow top, stretched tight, and a little brown-and-white prancy pony.”

Emily spat out a peanut. “Was it black? Did it have red stripes?”

“Coal black,” said Mr. Zalumis. “Shiny red stripes. Brand-new, not a scratch on it.”

Back at home the front door was wide open. Mrs. Nash wasn’t in her chair, and Ned was awake, standing up in his crib in his droopy drawers, calling, “Horse! Horse!” Emily picked him up and walked through the rooms of the house, trying to think. It was all her fault. She had never thrown out the Sears catalog. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it now, she thought, with Lucille in the middle of Victorian Christmas. She might as well just sit down on the back steps for a while, with her cheek against the back of Ned’s head, and listen to the brass band.

In the red-clay dirt of Snodgrass Alley she could see the horse tracks going down the middle of the road, and the tracks of the narrow wheels on each side, dug deep. For a while the tracks veered from side to side in graceful curves, as if the horse had felt frisky with such a light load, seeing the road stretching out so long and straight in front of him, but after a block or two the tracks straightened out and ran on down the road, steady and true, and out of sight.

Lonesome Without You