hair that never stayed neat and a beard he trimmed when he remembered. His small repair shop stood in a row of brick buildings on Maple Street in the town of Bellwether, Vermont, twenty minutes from the shopping plaza. There was no sign outside grander than WALKER'S AUTO & REPAIR, painted by his late wife on a sheet of plywood in letters that had weathered to the color of old blueberries.
Christmas Eve should have been a half day, but the shop's heating unit had failed the previous week, and a delivery driver needed his brakes checked before making the last run to Montpelier. Ethan had opened the doors before sunrise and worked with fingerless gloves beneath a portable heater that gave off more noise than warmth. By eleven, he'd earned enough to cover the groceries he still needed and a little of the overdue electric bill. It would not cover the shop rent, the insurance premium, or the estimate for the pickup's transmission, but those were tomorrow's problems, and for the moment he could still afford to put them in tomorrow.
Hope sat in the office behind a glass window, wearing her Santa hat and drawing a family of three beneath a Christmas tree. She had turned six in October and possessed her mother's dark eyes, serious eyebrows, and extraordinary ability to find meaning in objects other people threw away. Her crayons lived in a coffee can on the desk. Beside the can she kept an empty matchbox filled with treasures: a blue button, a polished stone, and a tiny brass screw that she insisted looked like a golden telescope.
"Daddy," she called through the office doorway, "do you think ballrooms have stars on the ceiling?" Ethan tightened the final bolt on the delivery truck and slid out from beneath it. "Real stars or pretend ones?" he asked. "Both," Hope said, without hesitation. "Like in the book Mom read." Ethan looked at the worn picture book resting on her lap, its cover showing a girl in a blue dress beneath a chandelier shaped like a constellation.
Mara had bought that book at the library sale before Hope was old enough to sit through a whole story. On winter nights she read it beside the living-room window while Ethan made cocoa, inventing voices for the characters and pretending not to notice when Hope fell asleep before the final page. In the story, a poor child was invited to a palace ball, where the people who wore diamonds discovered that she knew the names of the stars better than they did. Mara used to laugh at the ending and tell Hope that a ballroom was just a room until the right people walked into it.