The city does what it does in December: it puts lights up on Broad Street and the department stores run sales and people move through the cold with a specific energy that is either seasonal joy or seasonal pressure and is usually both.
Gideon buys a tree.
He has not done this since he was fourteen. He buys a small one — three feet, from a lot on Frankford Avenue — and he brings it home in the back of his car and he puts it in the corner of the apartment near the amber lamp where it immediately improves the room in a way he did not fully anticipate.
He does not have ornaments. He buys a box of plain silver balls and a string of white lights. He puts them on the tree on a Sunday evening with a scotch he drinks very slowly and music from his phone that he rarely listens to — his mother's kind of music, the old songs, the ones he knows without having chosen to learn them.
He stands back and looks at the tree.
It is a very small tree with plain ornaments in an apartment that has been designed to hold nothing unnecessary. And yet.
He takes a picture of it and sends it to Deborah.
She responds in thirty seconds: is this a tree?
He types: yes.
She types: you bought a tree.
He types: yes.
A pause. Then: I'm coming over.
He looks at the message. He types: you don't have to.
She types: I know. I want to. Have you eaten?
He types: coffee.
She types: I'll bring food.
She arrives forty-five minutes later with Thai food from a place she knows and a second string of lights — colored ones, red and green — because, she says, standing in his doorway with the bag and the lights, "white is correct and I respect that but it needed one more thing."
He lets her in. She hands him the food. She climbs on his couch without ceremony and adds the colored lights to the tree while he opens containers in the kitchen. He carries everything to the coffee table. She climbs down. She sits on the floor. He sits on the floor beside her.
They eat Thai food on the floor in front of the tree with the white lights and the colored lights that are, in fact, one more thing that the tree needed.
"This is the most decoration I've had in this apartment in four years," he says.
"Does it bother you?"
He looks at the tree. "No."
She looks at it too. "My family always did Christmas with a kind of maximum effort that I think exhausted everyone and also produced the best memories we have. My mother believed in overdoing it." A pause. "I've been underdoing it since I lived alone. In some kind of overcorrection."
"What about this year?"
She looks at him. "Better," she says.
The word is specific and quiet and means more than the tree.
He looks back at the tree. He does not say anything.
But she is there, and the tree is there, and the food is good, and for the first time in a long time the apartment contains someone else's warmth alongside his own, and the specific presence of it — the realness of it — is more than he expected.
They stay there until ten-thirty. She goes home. He cleans up. He turns off the white lights and leaves the colored ones on.
He goes to bed.
He sleeps very well.