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where they were, though,” she said. “You found the boxes.”
    “We will; don’t worry,” Martine told her.
    “I hope they’re not in the basement, instead.”
    Martine and I looked at each other.
    But no, they were in the attic. When we went back up, we spotted them on top of a disconnected radiator—two cardboard boxes marked Xmas in shaky crayon script. They weighed a lot less than the tree had. We could carry one apiece with no trouble.
    As I was heading toward the ladder, I threw another glance at the Twinform. “Of course, it didn’t allow for Fat Days,” I told Martine, “or Short Days, or any of those other days when women take forever deciding what to wear.”
    Martine said, “What?” Then she said, “ I take about two minutes deciding.”
    Which was abundantly obvious, I could have told her.
    By the time we got back to the living room, Mrs. Alford had emptied the tree carton and heaped all the branches in a tangle on the rug. She said, “Over in that corner is where we always put it. We mustn’t let it block the window, though. My husband hates for the tree to block the window.”
    I’d heard so much of that—the deceased coming back in present tense—I hardly noticed anymore.
    Martine set up the stand, while I fanned out the branches to get them looking more lifelike. It wasn’t the first time I’d put one of these together (a lot of our clients had switched to artificial), but I’d never quite adjusted to how soft the needles were. Each time I plunged my hand in among them, I felt disappointed, almost—expecting to be prickled and then failing to have it happen.
    Mrs. Alford was telling us about her grandchildren. “The oldest is sixteen,” she said, “and I’m sure she couldn’t care less whether I have a tree or not, but the little ones are at that dinky, darling, enthusiastic stage. And they’ll only be here for one night. I have to make my impression in a limited space of time, don’t you see.”
    Then she laughed merrily so we wouldn’t think she was serious, but of course she didn’t fool either of us for a second. She was dead serious.
    This one worker we had, Gene Rankin: he walked off the job after only three weeks. He said he couldn’t stand to get so tangled up in people’s lives. “Seems every time I turn around, I find myself munching cookies in some old lady’s parlor,” he said, “and from there it’s only a step or two to the ungrateful-daughter stories and the crying jags and the offers of a grown son’s empty bedroom.” Mrs. Dibble told him he would get used to it, but she just said that because she didn’t want to train another employee. You never get used to it.
    The tree turned out to be so big that we had to pull it farther from the wall once we started hooking the lower branches on. Martine wriggled in behind it and called for what she needed. “Okay, now the red-tabbed branches. Now the yellow,” and I would hand them over. Mrs. Alford went on talking. She was seated on a footstool, hugging her knees. “When the sixteen-year-old was that age,” she said, “—that dinky, darling age, I mean—why, I set a sleigh and a whole team of reindeer up on top of our roof. I climbed out the attic window and strung them along the ridgepole. But I was quite a bit younger then.”
    “Sheesh. I’ve never been that young,” I said.
    I must have sounded gruffer than I’d meant to, because Martine told Mrs. Alford, “Pay no mind to Barnaby. He had a bad trip to Philly.”
    “Oh, was this a Philadelphia week?” Mrs. Alford asked.
    “Natalie says he can’t come visit anymore,” Martine told her.
    “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Barnaby.”
    Martine crawled out from behind the tree and shucked her jacket off. Beneath it she wore overalls and a long-sleeved thermal undershirt that looked orphanish and skimpy, with the cuffs all stretched and showing her little wrists, as thin as pencils. “See if you can find some lights in one of those boxes,” she