Page 64 of A Winter in New York

“Not far,” he says. “It’s a surprise.”

I settle in, surreptitiously watching Gio out of the corner of my eye. “You look sexy driving this.”

He shoots me a look. “Don’t ask me to talk dirty again,” he says. “You got me in enough trouble this morning.”

“You liked it,” I say, laughing into my scarf.

He doesn’t deny it. “You didn’t really take your bra off, did you?”

I contemplate a lie. “No, I was making an omelet.”

He laughs, shaking his head as he turns the radio on. “You’re a real bad influence on me, Iris.”

I look out of my window, trying to stay in the moment rather than let his off-the-cuff words spiral me into thinking exactly how bad I am for Gio, jumping forward to the New Year when his opinion of me will hit the floor. The idea of him thinking badly of me is lead in my heart, so I tune my ear into the Christmas songs on the radio and hum along instead.

—

True to his word,our journey isn’t a long one, but it’s one I hope to remember forever. The combination of the car, the man driving it, and the glittering city lights as we drove across Brooklyn Bridge was the kind of perfect snapshot you can’t hope to capture on your cellphone camera. I’ve captured it in my head instead and filed it away to look back at in the days and years to come, in much the same way my mother spun a million love stories around that single photograph of Santo.

“Here should do it,” Gio says, pulling the car up curbside in a quiet residential street.

“Is it a restaurant?” I say, hoping not because Bobby and Robin called me upstairs to share pizza earlier.

Gio shakes his head as he gets out and locks the car.

“A bar?”

He shakes his head again and links his arm through mine.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“You’ll see,” he says.

The farther we walk, the more people there are on the streets too, obviously headed the same place as us. Couples, families with little kids, everyone bundled up in winter coats and hats.

We round a corner and I gasp, coming to a surprised standstill.

“Worth the suspense?”

The road ahead is a blaze of color, every house almost obscured by Christmas lights and ornaments. Huge golden snowflakes, life-size snowmen, illuminated Santas climbingdown chimneys. This is the America of my childhood movie-spun fantasies, Disney-bold and brashly beautiful.

“What is this place?” I breathe.

“Dyker Heights,” he says. “They’ve done this every year since the eighties, it goes on for another twenty blocks or so.”

We join the throngs of sightseers walking slowly through the illuminated streets, and honestly, I feel as if someone scooped me up and dropped me on a holiday movie set. Every house seems to be more ornately decorated than the last. Candy canes and dancing elves fill the front lawns, shimmering presents line the porch steps, starlight nets cover trees and shrubs.

“You can probably see this from space,” I say, blown away by the sheer scale and spectacle.

We pause outside a huge old house guarded by a battalion of ten-foot-tall nutcrackers, their brass uniform buttons flashing gold as Christmas music pumps from hidden speakers. Angels dance between the trees, and a life-size nativity scene takes up most of the lawn.

“Wow,” is all I can say. “How do they even do this every year? They must need another house just to store all the decorations.”

“It’s companies mostly these days,” Gio says. “Big business.”

“Oh, I quite fancy that job,” I say, taken with the idea. “Professional elf.”

We buy hot chocolate from a vending van, because this scene isn’t quite festive enough already, and Gio produces a hip flask of brandy and hands it to me.

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