I had to go along the switchbacks to get to him, saying excuse me and sorry and thank you to a long row of people, most of whom had small children in velvet dresses and clip-on bow ties, all of whom seemed to have witnessed the catch and to have opinions about it. A grandfather told me I should buy that man a beer. A girl of about six told me that she had dropped her mitten off the balcony once and it landed in the fountain and nobody caught it. A woman in a sequined reindeer sweater said, "He's cute," not quietly, and I said, "I don't know him," and she said, "Well," as though that were my problem and not a fact.
He was cute. I am not going to pretend about that; it would make me unreliable. He was tall and rangy, a little stooped in the shoulders the way tall men get from spending their lives leaning toward shorter people to hear them. He had a narrow, tired face with a nose that had been broken at some point and set slightly off true, and dark stubble going gray at the chin, and deep lines at the corners of his eyes, and under the orange cap his hair was black and needed cutting. His eyes were brown, and very steady, and they had the pinkish rims of someone who did not sleep at normal times. His work jacket had a hospital parking sticker on the zipper pull. He smelled like pretzels.
He held out the box on his open palm.
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you so much. You have no idea."
"It's very light," he said. "For a minute I thought it was empty and somebody was messing with me."
"It's not empty."
"I figured. Nobody yells like that about an empty box." He tilted his head at the tag, which was dangling from the red thread. I saw him read it. I saw him decide not to say anything about it, which I appreciated, and then I saw him look at the corner of the box, and I looked too.
The paper had split. When it hit his palm, the corner must have crushed a little, and the silver paper had torn along one edge, so that you could see the white cardboard underneath. It was not a big tear. But I had wrapped that box three times to get it right.
"Sorry," he said. "I tried to catch soft."
"You caught it beautifully. That's my fault. I'll fix it." I took the box and closed my hand around it, and it was a relief so intense my knees actually wobbled. "Okay. Well. Thank you. I'll get out of your—"
"You can't," he said.
"I can't what?"
He nodded past me toward the entrance of the ropes, where Bryn, Head Elf, was standing with her arms folded, watching us like a hawk watches a field mouse.
"If you leave," he said, "we're both out. She said."