The snow on Eighth Avenue did not fall so much as arrive, sideways and insistent, catching in the yellow glow of the streetlamps and in the cheap string lights Ms. Kwan had wound through the outdoor racks of potted evergreens.
It was the kind of cold that made people walk faster and then, against their own habits, slow down when they saw anything resembling Christmas.
Storefronts threw their colors onto the wet pavement: FARVEES in hard blue neon, and next door a bakery whose sign had lost three letters so that it read, stubbornly, …AEMNA BIER. A yellow taxi idled at the curb with its heater on and its driver eating something from a paper bag. Price tags fluttered on the trees—$13.50, $15.00—written in black marker on cardboard squares that had gone soft at the corners.
Celeste Byrne stopped because the smell of the lot stopped her: sap and wet bark and the faint metallic tang of snow melting on metal shelving. She was thirty-two, red-haired in the way that looked darker under streetlight, wearing an olive coat over a white turtleneck and a pair of red knit gloves she had bought on sale in October and already worn thin at the fingertips.
She worked evenings at the branch library six blocks north, and she had told herself, for eleven months, that she would not do this. She had told herself again on the walk over.
Then she had seen the last of the small tabletop trees, and her body had moved before her resolve finished its speech.
She put both gloved hands on the top of a little potted evergreen no taller than a suitcase set on end. The needles were dense and cold. The price tag said $13.50. It was the right size. It had always been the right size.
A man's hand closed over the same crown of green a half-second later—brown leather gloves, a camel overcoat, a burgundy scarf tucked in neatly, the kind of neatness that suggested he had learned it from someone who cared how scarves looked. Celeste looked up. He looked down. For a moment neither of them let go.
"You know," she said, "Christmas spirit usually involves sharing."
His mouth tipped, almost a smile, almost an apology. "I was going to share it. With my apartment."
As if the universe had been waiting for a cue, a clump of fake snow—cotton batting Ms. Kwan used to dress the display—slipped from a higher branch and landed squarely on his head. Celeste laughed before she could stop herself. He brushed it off with the back of his wrist, and something in his face opened: not charm exactly, but a willingness to be ridiculous in public for thirty seconds.
Ms. Kwan, who had been watching from the cash table with the patience of a woman who had sold trees for nineteen winters, walked over and hung a red SOLD tag under their joined hands.
The man glanced at the tag, then at Celeste. "Only if you let me buy you coffee."