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I don't move.

She doesn't say anything else. She comes around the counter, pulls out the low stool, and sets it down in front of me. Then she goes back around the counter and waits.

I step up. The tin is cold under my hands. I lift it down slowly, one hand under the base, the other steadying the canopy, and it's heavier than I remember. It's been four Decembers since anyone took it down. Dottie dusts it every Monday. I've never once asked her to.

I step down and set it on the counter between us.

Up close, under the lamp, it's smaller than it looks on the shelf. The base is the size of a cake pan, painted red with gold trim. The canopy is striped red and white, with a little gold flag on top. Six horses ride brass poles, each one painted a different color, frozen mid-stride. The key sticks out of the base on the side facing me.

Noelle leans down until she's eye level with the horses. She doesn't touch it.

"Who made it?" she asks.

"My grandfather. The winter they opened the shop, 1962." I rest my hand on the counter beside it. "He cut the horses out of old coffee tins and painted them at that bench in the back. He ordered the music box from Sweden. It took him all fall. Gran thought he was in the back doing inventory."

"He gave it to her?"

"On Christmas Eve, the first year. After close." I look at the gold flag. "She wound it right here, on this counter. Every Christmas Eve after that, she wound it at close, and everybody stood around and watched until it ran down. Then we went home."

"We?"

"I spent every December here from the time I was six. My parents worked through the holidays, so they sent me up the mountain. I swept tinsel and sorted letters, and I fell asleep under this counter more than once." I almost smile. "Gran would wind it, and I'd sit right where you're standing and watch the horses go around."

Noelle looks down at the floor where she's standing. Then back up at me.

"Your grandfather?"

"He died when I was twenty. She kept winding it." I swallow. My throat has gone tight. "Then four Decembers ago, she didn't wake up one morning. The first week of December. The window was already up. The mailbox was out. Kids were lining up to drop off their letters."

She's quiet. She waits.

"I opened the next morning," I say.

"Because somebody had to run it."

I look at her. She says it without any edge at all.

"I ran the whole thing," I say. "Every letter. Every bow. I set the timer on the window, and I didn't look at it. Christmas Eve, I locked up and went upstairs, and I didn't wind it."

"Upstairs?"

"Gran's apartment. I live there now."

"Why didn't you wind it?"

That's the question nobody's asked. Dottie never asked. She just started dusting it.

"Because when it runs down," I say, "she's still gone."

Noelle's eyes go bright. She blinks once, hard, and doesn't look away from me.

"She always wanted it in the window," I say. "Grandpa wouldn't let her. He said it was hers, and he wasn't sharing. After he died, she used to say, ‘Someday it goes in the window, so the whole town can see what it looks like when somebody makes a thing just for you.’"

"But you never put it there."

"The window's for everybody else."

"And the carousel's yours."