I stuck my head out the kitchen door and looked through the dining room to Diesel and my dad in the living room. Diesel was standing in front of the Christmas tree — a scrawny, five-foot-tall spruce set into a rickety stand. Four days to Christmas and already the tree was dropping needles. My father had placed a green and silver foil star at the balding top of the tree. The rest of the tree was ringed with colored twinkle lights and decorated with an assortment of ornaments collected over the lifetime of my parents' marriage. The rickety stand was wrapped in white cotton batting that was supposed to resemble snow. A village of aging cardboard houses had been assembled on the cotton batting.

Valerie's kids, nine-year-old Angie and seven-year-old Mary Alice, had finished the tree off with gobs of tinsel. Angie is the perfect child and is often mistaken for a very short forty-year-old woman. Mary Alice has had a longstanding identity problem and is usually convinced she's a horse.

"Nice tree," Diesel said.

My father concentrated on the television screen. My father knew a loser tree when he saw one and this was no prizewinner. He'd cheaped out, as usual, and he'd gotten the tree from Andy at the Mobil station. Andy's trees always looked like they were grown next to a nuclear power plant.

Mary Alice and Angie had been watching television with my father. Mary Alice tore her attention away from the screen and looked up at Diesel. "Who are you?" she asked.

"My name's Diesel," he said. "Who are you?"

"I'm Mary Alice, and I'm a beautiful palomino. And that's my sister Angie. She's just a girl."

"You aren't a palomino," Angie said. "Palominos have golden hair, and you have brown hair."

"I can be a palomino if I want to," Mary Alice said.

"Can not."

"Can too."

"Can not."

I closed the kitchen door and returned to the cookie cutting. "There's a toy store in the Price Cutter strip mall in Hamilton Township," I said to my mother and grandmother. "Do either of you know anything about it?"

"I never saw a toy store there," Grandma said, "but I was shopping with Tootie Frick last week, and we saw a store with a toy soldier on the door. I tried the door, but it was locked, and there weren't any lights on inside. I asked someone about it and he said the store was haunted. He said last week there was an electrical storm inside the store, with thunder and everything."