This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith

store-bought fruitcake. “Sarah’s busy making more nog.”
    David did not answer at once, and Mrs. McCartney with a puzzled expression started to speak to him again. Then he said, “Maybe I can help her get down,” and went out and climbed the stairs three at a time.
    Mrs. Beecham protested and laughed, and said she couldn’t get down in the chair, even if two men carried her.
    David picked her up chair and all, kicked the door open with his foot, and with Mrs. Beecham laughing and holding firmly to the banister with her right hand, they very slowly got down. A cheer went up as he carried her into the room and set her gently down on the sofa. He had left the chair in the hall.
    When David extricated himself from the parlor group and went up to his room, he found a small package wrapped in tissue paper on his bed. A card in the shape of a Santa Claus dangled from it and written in the white of the beard was “To dear David from Mollie Beecham.” The straggly writing, the clumsily tucked corners of the tissue wrapping, the thin, yellow, foil-threaded ribbon sent a torrent of pity through him, and as he stood there with the little package that he knew contained socks knitted by her hands, he thought that this might be as near as he would get to the spirit of Christmas this year. He pulled out a drawer in the bottom of his bureau and opened a round stud box of worn dark brown leather. Among buttons and a couple of odd cuff links—all his good cuff links were at his house—he found a ruby pin set with seed pearls. Having nothing to wrap it in, he took one of his white handkerchiefs, folded it as neatly as he could around the pin, cut a square from a sheet of typewriter paper, and wrote: “To Mrs. Beecham with a Merry Christmas from David.” He took it to her room, tiptoeing as if she were lying in the room asleep, and put it on the table where she kept her sewing articles. The pin had belonged to his mother, and though David had never been close to his mother, he ground his teeth and jerked his head away as he turned to go to the door.
    That evening at his house, during his ritual two martinis, he laid fir branches along his mantel, brightened them with holly, and on the cocktail table where the two glasses stood, he set up a little angels’ merry-go-round, lit its three candles, and turned off the Mozart Divertimento to listen to its simple, ever-changing tune of some nine notes. He had banked his few presents, most of them from a box from California that had come several days ago, at one side of his fireplace. In the total absence of Annabelle, not a present or even a card from her this year though last year there had been a present of an alligator key case, it was easier to feel that she was with him, that some of the presents were for her from other people, but that their presents to each other had been kept separate, to be opened together in some other room.
    After a simple but properly served dinner, he lay on the cowhide rug in front of the dying fire, his arms crossed on his chest. Their weight was Annabelle’s head resting there, and through the aroma of mingled firewood and fir, he could still detect the perfume that he knew. The concrete reality of the diamond clip he had sent her, that she had held in her hands at least and perhaps was holding at that moment, was a foundation on which to build the tallest of fantasies throughout the four days to come. With Annabelle he would plan voyages around the world, debate in advance about schools for their children (he liked to imagine they had a little girl already four and a boy two), consider a job offer in Brazil or Mexico, talk over the placement of a barbecue pit in the back patio, and whether they could afford to buy a small sailboat for next summer. He always saw Annabelle as more practical but also more impulsive than he, and almost never saying no to anything. He dressed her in silks, in fine wools, in mink and