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pet. Its name was Peepers. It was a stone the size of a small lemon, smoothed by decades of running water in the Sierra creek from which she had retrieved it during their summer vacation a year ago. She had painted two soulful eyes on it, and insisted, “Peepers is the best pet of all. I don’t have to feed him or clean up after him. He’s been around forever, so he’s real smart and real wise, and when I’m sad or maybe mad, I just tell him what I’m hurting about, and he takes it all in and worries about it so I don’t have to think about it any more and can be happy.”
    Emily was capable of expressing ideas that were, on the surface, entirely childlike but, on reflection, seemed deeper and more mature than anything expected from a seven-year-old. Sometimes, when he looked into her dark eyes, Marty felt she was seven going on four hundred, and he could hardly wait to see just how interesting and complex she was going to be when she was all grown up.
    After their hair was brushed, the girls climbed into the twin beds, and their mother tucked the covers around them, kissed them, and wished them sweet dreams. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she warned Emily because the line always elicited a giggle.
    As Paige retreated to the doorway, Marty moved a straight-backed chair from its usual place against the wall and positioned it at the foot of—and exactly between—the two beds. Except for a miniature battery-powered reading lamp clipped to his open notebook and a low-wattage Mickey Mouse luminaria plugged into a wall socket near the floor, he switched off all the lights. He sat in the chair, held the notebook at reading distance, and waited until the silence had acquired that same quality of pleasurable expectation that filled a theater in the moment when the curtain started to rise.
    The mood was set.
    This was the happiest part of Marty’s day. Story time. No matter what else might happen after rising to meet the morning, he could always look forward to story time.
    He wrote the tales himself in a notebook labeled Stories for Charlotte and Emily, which he might actually publish one day. Or might not. Every word was a gift to his daughters, so the decision to share the stories with anyone else would be entirely theirs.
    Tonight marked the beginning of a special treat, a story in verse, which would continue through Christmas Day. Maybe it would go well enough to help him forget the unsettling events in his office.
    “Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past, more turkey eaten this year than last—”
    “It rhymes!” Charlotte said with delight.
    “Sssshhhhh!” Emily admonished her sister.
    The rules of story time were few but important, and one of them was that the two-girl audience could not interrupt mid-sentence or, in the case of a poem, mid-stanza. Their feedback was valued, their reactions cherished, but a storyteller must receive his due respect.
    He began again:
    “Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past, more turkey eaten this year than last, more stuffing stuffed, more yams jammed into our mouths, and using both hands, coleslaw in slews, biscuits by twos, all of us too fat to fit in our shoes.”
    The girls were giggling just where he wanted them to giggle, and Marty could barely restrain himself from turning around in his chair to see how Paige liked it so far, as she had heard none of it until this moment. But no one would respond to a storyteller who couldn’t wait until the end for his plaudits; an unshakable air of confidence, whether faked or genuinely felt, was essential to success.
    “So let’s look ahead to the big holiday that’s coming, coming, coming our way. I’m sure you know just what day I mean. It’s not Easter Sunday, not Halloween. It’s not a day to be sad and listless. I ask you, young ladies, what is it—?”
    “It’s Christmas!” Charlotte and Emily answered in unison, and their immediate response confirmed that he had them in his spell.
    “Someday soon, we’ll put up