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told me.
    But Mrs. Alford had beaten me to it. She was hauling them forth hand over hand—the old-fashioned kind of lights, with the big, dull bulbs. “It’s a terrible thing, divorce,” she said. “Especially when the child is caught in the middle.”
    I said, “I don’t know that she’s in the middle , exactly.”
    “He ought to talk to his lawyer,” Martine said.
    “Of course he ought!” Mrs. Alford said. “When my nephew and his wife split up—”
    “Or go to Legal Aid.”
    “Oh, Legal Aid is a lovely organization!”
    “Hmm,” I said, making no promises.
    “Or another possibility: my brother is a lawyer,” Mrs. Alford told me. She hooked a scratched blue bulb onto the lowest branch. “Retired, needless to say, but still …”
    I changed the subject. I said, “Mrs. Alford, you know that Twinform you have in your attic.”
    “Twinform?” she asked. She moved to the branch on her right.
    “I was wondering. Did you buy it yourself? Or was it handed down through your family?”
    “I’m not entirely certain what you’re talking about,” she said.
    “That wooden person standing near your chimney. Kind of like a dress form.”
    “Oh, that. It was my mother’s.”
    “Well, guess where it was manufactured,” I told her. “My great-grandfather’s woodenworks.”
    “His woodenworks, dear?”
    “His shop that made wooden shoe trees and artificial limbs.”
    “Mercy,” Mrs. Alford said.
    I could see she was only being polite. She moved away from the tree and started unpacking ornaments, most of them homemade: construction-paper chains gone faded and brittle with age, pine cones glopped with red poster paint. “Someday I should get that attic cleared out,” she said. “When would I use a dress form? I’ve never sewn a dress in my life. The most I’ve done is quilt a bit, and now that my eyes are going, I can barely manage that much. I’ve been working on a quilt of our planet for the past three years; isn’t that ridiculous?”
    “Oh, well, what’s the hurry?” I asked. (No point explaining all over again that the Twinform wasn’t meant for sewing.)
    “One little measly blue planet, and it’s taking me forever!”
    “But here’s the weird part,” I said, reaching for one of the chains. It made a dry, chirpy sound, like crickets. “How the Twinform came into being was, an angel showed up and suggested it.”
    “An angel!” Mrs. Alford said.
    “Or so my family likes to claim. They say she walked into the shop one day: big, tall woman with golden hair coiled in a braid on top of her head. Said she wanted shoe trees, but when Great-Granddad showed her a pair, she barely glanced at them. ‘What women really need,’ she said—these are her very words; Great-Granddad left a written account—‘What women really need is a dress tree. A replica of their entire persons. How often have I put on a frock for some special occasion,’ she said—‘frock,’ you notice—‘only to find that it doesn’t suit and must be exchanged for another at the very last moment, with another hat to match, other jewelry, other gloves and footwear?’ And then she walked out.”
    Martine was staring at me, with her mouth a little open. Mrs. Alford said, “Really!” and hooked a modeling-clay cow onto a lower branch.
    “It was the walking out that convinced them she was an angel, I believe,” I said. “If she’d stayed awhile—if she’d haggled over prices, say, or bought a little something—she’d have been just another customer making chitchat. But delivering her pronouncement and then leaving, she came across as this kind of, like, oracle. She stayed in Great-Granddad’s mind. Before the week was over, he’d built himself a prototype Twin-form and paid a neighbor’s artistic daughter to paint the face and hair on. See, you got your very own features custom painted, was the clincher.”
    Mrs. Alford handed me a bent cardboard star covered with aluminum foil, not one point matching any