Mrs. Alvarez was waiting in the hall when he arrived. She had lived next door for eleven years and possessed the practical tenderness of someone who believed a problem should be addressed before it acquired a dramatic name. She had once worked as a school cafeteria supervisor, raised three children, and now treated the apartment building as an unofficial extended family. Everett paid her whenever he could for watching Marlo, though she had a habit of returning the money disguised as groceries.
"Your little artist is still awake," she said, pointing toward his door. "She claims she has a very important project."
"Every project is very important at seven."
"That is why seven-year-olds run the world better than most adults." Mrs. Alvarez studied his face. "And you look like you've been carrying a refrigerator instead of fixing one."
Everett offered the usual assurance that everything was fine, and she gave him the look that told him she did not believe a word of it. She had known Clara, had watched the first awful months after her death, and had never accepted that independence required a person to refuse every helping hand. But she also understood that Everett's pride was made less from vanity than from a fear of becoming permanently dependent on kindness he could not repay.
Inside, Marlo was lying on the carpet with her notebook opened beneath a lamp. She had drawn three figures beneath a Christmas tree: herself, her father, and her mother represented as a star above them. She did not always draw Clara that way. Sometimes she gave her a chair at the table, or a blue coat, or wings, depending on what she thought a mother in heaven might need.
Everett sat on the floor beside her. "I like the star."
"It's Mom," Marlo said. "I know."
"Do you think she can see our tree?"
He considered what he could say honestly. "I don't know exactly what she can see, sweetheart. But I know she loved Christmas with us. And every time we remember her, she's still part of it."
Marlo examined the drawing. "Maybe stars don't need windows."
"Maybe they don't."
After she fell asleep, Everett returned to the kitchen and opened the notebook. The heating balance seemed larger under the yellow light. He considered borrowing money, but his closest friends had families and obligations of their own, and the small debts accumulated since Clara's death made him wary of asking again. At midnight he took a tin box from the top of the cupboard and opened it on the table.
Inside lay the wristwatch Clara had given him on their fifth wedding anniversary. It was not a luxury watch, only a stainless-steel model with a dark face and a narrow scratch near the clasp. She had saved for months to buy it, teasing him that a man who kept missing buses needed a better way to measure time. He had worn it to work, to their daughter's first school performance, and once to the hospital when he held Clara's hand through a night neither of them had expected to be their last together.