Shaking off the abject strangeness of someone just giving away their engagement ring, Clark hung it up towards the top of the tree. It caught the light, spinning in the gentle breeze of the drafty old house. Even if he wasn’t inclined to like her—which he was, he’d admitted defeat in his battle against his affection for Kate—he’d still be the first to admit how impressive Kate’s instant recall of the facts of the town was. Like a close-hand magic trick, Clark all at once wanted to move in closer and step further back. Her confession about her childhood rattled him; the distraction of decorating didn’t prove as distancing as he hoped. She’d been so broken by her family that she’d devoted her life to everyone else in this town.

No wonder they all came at her call today. No wonder they decorated his house and cooked a banquet at her request.

“This one’s a tiny fake tree,” Clark said, twirling the small carving. Kate wedged herself between the wall and the tree, trying to decorate an unseen portion of branches, so this one demanded some description.

“Does it have little red baubles on it?” she asked, muffled by the tree between them.

“Yes.”

“That one’s from Mr. and Mrs. Simon. Their little grandbaby died, and Mrs. Simon built the coffin herself out of a tree in their backyard. She took a piece of the scrap wood and carved that.”

Clark cradled the tiny ornament in the palm of his hands, staring down at it reverently as he searched for a word to properly describe the empty cavern opening in his chest. He hadn’t felt this way in so long.

“That’s sad.”

“Don’t worry. There are plenty of funny ones in there.” Kate came to the rescue as Clark placed the tiny tree in a high place of honor upon the larger tree. “Do you see any paper flowers made out of thick paper? They should have music notes on them, if that helps.”

Digging around, he finally found not one, but about twenty of those flowers tucked into a shoebox in the bottom of one of the ornament crates.

“Yeah.”

“Those were given to us by Pastor Mark, but he didn’t make them. He caught a bunch of boys making paper airplanes out of hymnal pages, so he decided if they liked folding paper so much, they would take all two hundred of the out-of-date hymnals and make paper flowers out of them. They spent six days of Christmas vacation making those things.”

They carried on in this fashion for longer than Clark cared to admit; even worse, he hung on her every word. He actually invested himself in the intersecting and interweaving lives of these strangers. A born storyteller, Kate shared every story she remembered, dragging him deeper and deeper into the melting-pot mythologies of Miller’s Point.