Maybe this was all wrong. Maybe there was a better strategy instead of the mall-after-Thanksgiving method. Kevin walked deeper into the store and saw an aisle of perfumes and noticed the pretty woman behind the counter talking to a customer about one of them. Jenny already had about twenty different perfumes. Some of them were so old Kevin was sure they smelled more like oblivion than Obsession.

He sighed and started to walk toward the mall side of the store when he saw it. A big tree was nearly blocking the doors. It wasn’t decorated in gold and silver or red and green. Instead, it was covered in various-colored angel ornaments. Each ornament was made out of paper and contained a white slip at the bottom, a slip resembling a form someone might leave on your door handle after stopping by. Kevin slowed down and stared at it out of curiosity.

The strips of paper looked as if they had handwriting on them.

Must be a kids’ project or some kind of fund-raiser.

As a father and his daughter walked up to the tree and then stood in front of it, Kevin watched. He hoped they didn’t catch him gawking. The girl appeared delighted, as if she’d won a prize or something. Maybe there were prizes on the tree that somebody could pick out if they bought a certain ridiculous amount of stuff in the store. The father nodded at his daughter, who was maybe ten or so, and she carefully chose a paper angel. She studied it carefully and then read to her father whatever was written on it. Kevin was too far back to hear what the girl was saying, with the crowds and the chatter and the background music, so he moved up a little closer.

“That’s great,” the father told her.

Maybe she had won some designer shoes or a 40-percent-off coupon or something like that. Yet the look on the little girl’s face said it was something else, something deeper.

As they started to move away from the tree, Kevin backed up and bumped into a woman who looked like she could pin him in a cage-wrestling match. The woman was large and looked very displeased.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry.”

She gave him a look that said, You should be. Kevin grinned and wondered why he still sometimes felt like a fourteen-year-old around some people.

“Well?” she asked him in an accent that reminded him of his aunt.

Some southerners had accents, and some had accents. This woman fit all the stereotypes of the south except for that one big one that found her charming.

“No, sorry, go ahead,” Kevin said, not sure what she was talking about.

She just shook her head and walked to the tree. The woman wore jeans that came up to her rib cage and a faded shirt that was way too small. Her hair looked desperate for a good washing. It wasn’t that Kevin was someone who judged people by their appearance—but it was a striking contrast to see someone like this amid the others in the shopping mall. A distant thought came to him when he wondered why she looked like she had just gotten out of bed.