The paper snowflakes had been Bettina's idea, and she had cut every one of them herself, at her desk, over eleven lunch breaks, with a pair of orange-handled scissors she kept in a drawer labeled SCISSORS. By the night of the Farrow & Lisle holiday party there were two hundred and six of them taped to the windows of the fourteenth floor, and against the dark glass, with the city lights behind them, they looked less like snowflakes than like a great many small, careful attempts at something.
Margot Kessler stood by the snack table and counted them because counting was easier than looking at the door.
The snack table had a yellow tablecloth. Bettina had wanted red, but the party store had only yellow, and Bettina had decided yellow was "festive in a brave way." On it sat a silver bowl of popcorn, a silver bowl of mixed nuts that had been reduced over the past hour to the Brazil nuts nobody wanted, a leaning tower of plastic cups, and a bottle of sparkling cider that someone had brought instead of wine as a statement. Above it, gold and green tinsel curtained the doorway to the break room, so that anyone going for ice had to part it like an actor making an entrance. Bunting hung in loops from the ceiling tiles. In the corner, at the old upright piano that had been in the office longer than most of the employees, Mr. Farrow was playing something soft and slow that might have been "The Christmas Song" if "The Christmas Song" had been through a difficult divorce.
"He's going to do 'Blue Christmas' next," said Anil, appearing at her elbow with two cups of cider. "He does 'Blue Christmas' at nine-fifteen every year. You could set a watch by it."
"You've been here four years. That's not enough data."
"Dottie told me. Dottie has twenty-nine years of data." He handed her a cup. "Drink. You look like you're waiting for a jury to come back."
"I'm not waiting for anything."
"You're not waiting for anything and you're checking the door every eleven seconds. I timed it."
Margot drank the cider, which tasted like apple juice that had been told a secret. She was wearing the burgundy blazer she wore to pitches she expected to win, over a black top with a lace neck that her sister said made her look like a Victorian widow with a retirement plan, and a black skirt, and the pearl studs her grandmother had given her the week she made senior account lead. Her red hair was down, which it never was at work. She had told herself that was because it was a party. She had told herself a number of things.
"He's not coming," she said. "He didn't come last year."
"Last year he had food poisoning."
"Last year he had food poisoning the afternoon of the party and was seen at the climbing gym at eight p.m."
"Seen by who?"
"By Dottie's nephew."
Anil considered this. "Dottie's reach is frightening."
Across the room, Dottie herself sat at a folding table beside the photo booth with a cash box she did not need, since the booth was free, and a clipboard, since Dottie believed every event in human history would have been improved by a clipboard. She was seventy-one. She had answered the phones at Farrow & Lisle since before it was Farrow & Lisle, since it was Lisle Brothers Advertising, since there had been actual Lisle brothers. She wore a sweater with a knitted reindeer whose nose was a real bell, and when she laughed, the bell rang.
The photo booth was the evening's centerpiece. Bettina had rented the cabinet, a wooden box the size of a small closet with a heavy tan curtain on a brass rod, and inside, on a little stand, she had set up her own vintage Polaroid, a boxy thing from the late seventies she'd bought at an estate sale and restored over a summer. It had a cable release you squeezed from the bench. It took one print per flash, and the prints slid out of the front slot blank and pale as milk, and you had to wait for them. That was the point, Bettina had explained at the all-hands, in a speech that ran a little long. "Nobody waits for anything anymore. I want us to wait for something together."