If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do

And if you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you.

Polly doesn’t have much more than a ha’penny this Christmas season, but she feels blessed. Belleville does the holiday right. The shops and empty storefronts on Main Street are hung with white lights, which Polly’s mother always believed more tasteful than varicolored bulbs. There is a manger outside the Lutheran Church at the far end of Main Street. And there is one house—there is always one house—that goes over the top with its yard—a rocking sleigh with a Santa reciting in a mechanized voice: Ho-Ho-Ho. Ho-Ho-Ho. People drive twenty, thirty miles just to see this place.

The only Dundalk tradition Polly misses is the Christmas Garden at the Wise Avenue fire department, where they re-created Baltimore in miniature with a train set, right down to the domino sugars sign. Maybe one day she’ll make her own Christmas garden.

A year ago, she was running around, trying to give Gregg his version of a perfect Christmas. Jani, not even three at the time, would have been happy with anything Polly did. Not Gregg. The Hansens had definite ideas about Christmas. Savannah Hansen brought over her ornaments, showed Polly the angel for the treetop, the stockings she had made, garish, tacky things of red felt with glitter glue names. “Here’s the one I made for Gregg and now Jani.”

There was no stocking for her daughter-in-law.

The Costellos had traditions, too. Not the seven fishes, although her dad’s family was pretty Italian. Her dad, unlike Gregg, didn’t think a husband’s family had to swamp the wife’s when it came to rituals. Then again, to be fair to Gregg—Wow, where did that thought come from?—he knew her as Pauline Smith, a woman with no family, no history. It probably never occurred to him that she had a distinctive past with its own traditions, such as turkey and sauerkraut, or a Christmas garden in the basement. Even in the getting-to-know-you phase, the phase where men pretend great interest in women, he never asked her a single question.

Adam didn’t, either. But that’s different, of course.

Adam. Polly is, with the help of Mr. C’s wife, knitting him a sweater. She tries to tell herself that it will be more meaningful than any store-bought gift. And if a better knitter was working on it, this would be true. The fact is, even the wool, a sky blue that matches his eyes, strains her pocketbook. She’s beginning to think she will never have any money, that it was all a dream. Everything, her entire life, is a dream. There was never a girl in a yellow two-piece. She didn’t marry Burton Ditmars. There is no Joy, no Jani. There are no fires, no schemes, no Cath. She is not in Belleville. She never met Adam.

But her imagination snags; she cannot imagine life without Adam. For better or worse, this is her life. Lately, it’s all for the better.

She wonders what Adam will give her for Christmas. She tries to catalog the gifts she received from Ditmars and Gregg, making it a memory game.

She remembers:

A nightgown. The first Christmas with Ditmars. There was still hope.

A vacuum. The third Christmas with Ditmars.

A sweater. Not cashmere, but something almost as soft. Christmas number two?

Earrings. Amber, dangly. He liked dangly earrings. That was Christmas number two, the sweater was number three, the vacuum cleaner number four.

A Sony Walkman. Gregg, their first year. He wanted one, so he assumed she wanted one.

A pear tree. “Partridge not included,” Gregg joked upon presenting her with it on Christmas Eve. Bizarre, but she had liked him better for it. It hinted at some version of her that he had in his head, something funny and quirky. The kind of gift that a woman in a romantic comedy might get from a would-be suitor.

He probably saw it at some Christmas tree lot near a liquor store, while he was buying El Gordo lottery tickets.

She cannot, try as she might, needles clicking faster and faster as if to keep pace with her whirring memory, remember what Ditmars gave her their last Christmas together. She has heard somewhere that when it comes to a list of seven or more, whether it’s the dwarfs or the nine Supreme Court justices, the memory always comes up one short. But then, she also has heard that it was possible to memorize seven-digit phone numbers in a way that we can never remember the new ten-digit ones. The ten-digit numbers aren’t truly new, but they became common while she was in prison, and she thinks of the world that way, as if the years between her two selves, her two marriages, aren’t real. Those years are like scar tissue, the purplish, rubbery damage done by burns, thick and marbled.

Polly has a burn like that, high on her thigh, so high that a modest, skirted swimsuit can conceal it. By the time a man sees it, he doesn’t know how to ask about it. How does one get a burn there, beneath the curve of the right ass cheek? How does something hot touch that almost hidden place? How long would it have to be held there to do that kind of damage?

No one wants to hear the real answers to questions like that. No one. She has to assume as much, because Gregg never asked. Adam never asks. The scar might as well be a tattoo: If you can see this, you are too close.

She’s going too fast, and she’s dropped a stitch. Mrs. C showed her the fix for that, but it doesn’t come naturally to Polly. She wants to think that Adam won’t notice, but she’s kidding herself. He notices everything.

He’s certainly going to notice when she’s suddenly rich, but she already has a story picked out for when that day comes. Which will be soon, she’s pretty sure. It better be soon.