It took twenty minutes, not fifteen, because a girl of about three in front of us got to the throne, looked up into Truett's face, and screamed as though she were being lowered into a volcano, and her parents spent five minutes trying to get a single frame in which she was not mid-scream before they gave up and bought the screaming one. Truett took it all with great serenity. He said something to the mother as they left that made her laugh in a wet, exhausted way, and he patted the little girl's shoe, and then he looked up, saw Oren, and broke into a grin that showed a gold tooth on the left side.
"Well, look at this," Truett boomed. He had a voice like a cello played by someone who smoked. "Oren Castellanos. Where's your sister?"
"In the parking garage, covered in vomit," Oren said.
"That's the holidays," Truett said. "Who's this?"
"This is Greta," Oren said. "She's filling in."
Truett looked at me from under eyebrows like two snowbanks. He had pale blue eyes and a red nose that I suspected was not entirely makeup. "Filling in," he repeated.
"I dropped something on him from the second floor," I said. "He caught it."
"Ho," said Truett, and it was not a ho-ho-ho kind of ho; it was the noise a man makes when a fish hits his line. "Well, come here, the both of you. I've got a schedule. Bryn'll have my hide."
The photographer, whose name tag said DYLAN, PHOTO ELF, waved us into position. The throne was flanked by two fake snowdrifts made of white batting and glitter and a fake little evergreen with lights on it, and behind it was the plywood cottage with its fake chimney, and on the chimney a stuffed reindeer looked down at us with glass eyes and an expression of deep weariness. Oren went to Santa's right, without being told, like a man going to his locker. I went to Santa's left. Truett put a heavy velvet arm around each of us, which was not, I thought, in the agreement.
"Now," he said, "since this is my house and my rules, I have to ask. What do you want for Christmas, young lady?"
"I'm thirty-four," I said.
"That's young from where I'm sitting. What do you want?"
I opened my mouth to say something smart. I had a whole list of smart things. A new tuning hammer. A van that doesn't leak oil. World peace. But Truett was looking at me with those pale blue eyes, which were very kind and very old, and a small boy in the line behind the rope was staring at me with his mouth open, waiting to hear what a grown-up asked Santa for, and I found that I did not have it in me to be smart.