"Do you really drive . . . ride a motorcycle?" she asked.
Matt nodded, pulling his gloves out of his jacket pockets, and amused by what it took to impress the almost-post-teenager these days. "It's on loan from a friend"
"What kind? A Harley? Hardly."
"It's a British make you wouldn't know. Hesketh."
She shook her head. "What color is it?"
"Silver."
"Cool." Krys tossed the van keys into the tiny purse she wore slung slantwise over her bulky jacket and hopped out of the vehicle.
Matt climbed out in his own good time, beginning to appreciate the ease of getting onto a motorcycle versus entering and exiting one of these sliding-door rolling warehouses.
"Does it go fast?" she asked over the van rooftop.
"The motorcycle? Sure, if I let it."
"Oh, that's too cool. You're the only priest I know who rides a motorcycle."
Matt had come around to the driver's side. Bo's daughter was a deceptive five feet eight inches tall, a big girl with a mature look way beyond her behavior. Her easy energy and naive enthusiasms were going to wear him out in an hour, but he couldn't spend the entire afternoon lying to her by omission.
"Listen, Krys. Nobody else knows this yet, but I left the priesthood several months ago. And although I'm sure some priests do ride motorcycles, I'm not one of them and they don't ride Hesketh Vampires."
"Vampires? Your bike is called a Vampire? Why?"
"It, um, howls when the engine gets up to speed."
"Oh, I want one! Too cool. So."
She clicked the control to lock the van's many doors, then slid him a wary glance. In it, Matt could read speculation about the stir his news would cause in their thoroughly Catholic family.
"I never heard much about you when I was growing up," she said, turning and maneuvering over the ice-rutted parking lot with mountain-goat delicacy. Matt fell into the same surefooted step with her. "Just that you were a priest, the only priest the whole darn family has produced. They kept looking at my brothers and sisters and me like one of us should be a sacrificial virgin or something." Krys glanced down, then the toe of her flimsy ankle boot stamped flat a ruffled rut of snow. "I'm getting read the riot act just for thinking I might not want to go to a Catholic college."
At the mall entrance, Matt opened one of a rank of glass doors for her. "That's not exactly written into the Council of Trent. There are other good schools. Still, you can't beat the quality of education."
He had forgotten about store vestibules in the north. Here, out of the wind, everyone paused to stamp snow clods off their boots, and stuff their pockets with the gloves and scarfs that would soon become suffocatingly hot inside the mall, then advance through a second barrier of glass doors.
"What exactly do you want here?" Krys asked as he ushered her through a second door.
For a moment, Matt paused, interpreting her question in the global sense. What did he want here in Chicago, among this family of strangers? Then he realized that her world was the here and now, and at this moment, that was the mall.
"Presents for my mother. I brought the usual boxes of candy, but I wanted to get her something more personal. It's been a long time since I was home for Christmas." He smiled at Krys. "Actually, I'm kind of glad you're my escort today. I could use a personal shopper."
"You got it! I adore shopping, especially when it isn't with my money, which there's darn little of." She studied him again. "I thought the minute I saw you that you didn't look like a priest. You don't even look like the rest of the family."
He wasn't going to touch that one. "I look like my mom, don't I?'
"A little, maybe, but she's so--" Krys visibly reined in her tongue.
They paused in front of a huge, two-sided display of the mall's layout of stores.
"I know what you mean about Mom. That's what struck me," Matt said. "The old house is so plain and dreary, all the colors faded to the same nothing tone. I'd forgotten how it looked here in winter, not like the Christmas cards with fresh snow mounding over everything. Old snow gets packed with dirt and cinders and turns into ice, like a comet."
"All the houses in our old neighborhood are like that. They're old and everything in them is old-fashioned. But I just don't like the winter, period. That's why I'd like to go to school someplace on the West Coast."
"That kind of atmosphere can get old in its own way," he warned her. 'Anyway, I was thinking about getting Mom something pretty to wear, but you know her better than I do, and you know what women would like way better than I would."
"Yeah." She eyed him, laughed, blushed, then met his glance again. "I can do it. Personal shopping, I mean. But your mom's a tough case. Aunt Mira doesn't seem to have any preferences, for anything."
"Well, I know what we can't get her: nothing ... too radical. Too bright, or what she'd consider too young. With a restaurant hostess job I'd think clothes would be more of a concern, but--"
"Look at where she's a hostess! A neighborhood family-style place that's been there for years. Nobody under forty goes in there," Krys added with intense disdain.
"Well, then take me to where people under forty go to buy nice things for people over forty."
"Gee, I don't know that territory either. Matt." Obviously, using the first name of an older cousin, and older ex-priest cousin, was a kick. Krys (maybe short for Krystal) frowned at the colorful blocks representing various stores. "I guess I'll just take you where I never go! What's your budget?"
"I have no idea. But I do have a credit card."
"I love credit cards!"
"With a very modest credit limit. You don't build up an impressive financial history in my former line of work."
"No, I guess not."
They joined the streaming aggregates of people cruising the mall's brightly lit but still vast and institutional corridors, despite the plastic fir boughs and Christmas lights frosting shop fronts, escalators and the high glass atrium ceilings.
A medley of Christmas music filled the air above them, and overpowering bursts of scented candles exhaled from shop entrances.
"Crazy, huh?" Krys obviously didn't expect an answer. "Okay. Here's Chessey's. Let me do the talking. I'm sure these witchy old bats will jump on us the minute we enter, they're so anxious to make a sale."
Krys angled toward a shop whose windows featured mannequins in expensive dressy suits, quite different from the merchandise-crowded, glitzy shops bristling with holographic accessories and lots of imitation black leather that drew her like a magnet.
In her taut black tights--leggings, Matt had seen them called now--and the short bronze vinyl anorak, Krys resembled a gilded pumpkin on stilts, a kind of Cinderella's coach before the fairy godmother had gotten to it.
The middle-aged saleswoman who headed toward them with lacquered hair and heavy gold jewelry clanking like Marley's chains would probably have glowered Krys out of the shop, had she not been accompanied by that moving target in any malclass="underline" a man who needed to buy something for a woman for Christmas. In other words, a man who had money and needed help spending it.
"May I assist you?" the saleswoman crooned in the impeccable grammar that always seemed so phony.
Matt wasn't used to such catering, but Krys acted as if she'd been thirsting for it all of her life.
"Yes, please. We need something for an older lady. Nothing too frilly, too glitzy or too impractical, but pretty."
"A relative?" the saleswoman asked.
"My mother," Matt put in.
"Oh, good. Is her coloring similar?"