# CHAPTER 2
Across Central Park, on Park Avenue, Edward Hail was putting on his coat in a large and very quiet apartment.
He was thirty-eight. He built apartment buildings all over Manhattan, and his company was one of the most successful in the city. His wife had died four years earlier. Since then he had worked twelve hours a day, every day, because work was the only thing that filled the silence.
On Sunday his mother would turn sixty-six.
Margaret Hail was a grand old lady of New York who still wore pearls to breakfast. Every year Edward bought her something expensive — a bracelet, a silk scarf, a crystal vase. Every year she said, “Thank you,” put it away in a cupboard, and never looked at it again.
This year he had no idea what to buy.
So he did what he always did. He told his driver to take him to Bergman’s.
Upstairs, in the gift department, a saleswoman showed him brooches and gloves and an enamel music box. He looked at all of them and saw none of them. He kept thinking about a red scarf and a smile and a little girl’s curtsy. In the end he chose a silver brooch in the shape of a bird. It was beautiful and expensive, and he already knew that his mother would put it in the cupboard.
When he came down the marble staircase with the gift box under his arm, he saw them again.
They were standing at a glass display case near the tree, in the children’s shoe department. The little girl had her forehead pressed against the glass. Inside, on a red velvet cushion under a tiny Christmas tree, stood a pair of children’s shoes in shiny red patent leather, with satin bows and little buckles shaped like stars.
On a small card beside them was the price. Thirty-eight dollars.
Edward did not know that it was almost a whole week of her mother’s wages. But he saw the mother’s face as she read the card, and he understood everything.
The little girl did not ask for anything. She took a stub of pencil out of one pocket and a bus ticket out of the other, and she began to draw the shoes on the back of the ticket, carefully — the bow, the buckle, the shine on the toe.
Her mother crouched down beside her and put an arm around her shoulders.
“Not today, sweetheart,” she whispered.
“I know, Mama,” the girl said. “I’m only drawing them so I don’t forget.”
Edward stood behind them with the gift box in his hands. He had bought a hundred expensive things in his life. He had never wanted anything the way this child wanted those shoes. And she had not even asked.
He walked over. Not quickly. Not like a rich man coming to rescue somebody. Slowly, the way you approach people you have already met.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I think we were introduced at the revolving doors. Edward Hail.”
The young woman stood up, surprised, her cheeks going pink.
“Anna Kowalski,” she said. “And this is Rosie.”
Rosie held up the bus ticket.
“Do you want to see?”
He crouched down so that he was the same height as her and looked at the drawing for a long time. Seriously, the way he looked at an architect’s plans.
“You have a very good hand, Miss Rosie,” he said. “The bow is better than the real one.”
Rosie glowed.
Edward stood up and looked at Anna. Not at the shoes. Not at her old coat. Into her eyes.
“Mrs. Kowalski,” he said quietly. “Today I came here to buy a present for my mother. I buy her one every year, and every year she puts it in a cupboard. Because it is only something that is expected.”
He paused.
“Your daughter looks at those shoes as if they were a miracle. I have never in my life given anybody a miracle. Would you allow me to — just once?”
Anna did not answer at once.
She was proud. She had never taken anything from anyone, not even from Mr. Novak, unless she could pay it back. Her first word was going to be no.
But she looked at Rosie, who was holding her breath. And she saw that this man was not deciding for her. He was asking. He was waiting for her answer as if it mattered.
She nodded.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Then I have a present for you, too.”
“I work in a bakery on Ninth Avenue. Let me bake a cake for your mother’s birthday. A Polish honey cake. My grandmother’s recipe. Something nobody can buy in any shop.”
Edward smiled.
“I think,” he said, “that will be the first present she has not put in a cupboard.”
The saleswoman brought the shoes in a white box lined with tissue paper.
Rosie sat down on the velvet bench by the tree. Edward knelt on the marble floor in his camel coat, took off her worn brown boots, and fastened the little star buckles himself.
Rosie stood up. She took three steps across the marble under the great tree — and then she stopped, and looked down at her feet.
The red shoes shone in the light of the chandeliers.
She did not say anything. She just looked.
Anna, standing beside the most successful builder in New York, saw on her daughter’s face something she would remember for the rest of her life.
And then, watching the man kneel, she understood something else, something that made her colder and kinder at the same time. This was not generosity. This was a starving man feeding someone else because he could not feed himself. It was there in his eyes when he said the word miracle. It was there in the way he had said cupboard.
She told herself it was one kind act by one kind stranger, and that by Christmas he would not remember their names.
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