"Thank you. For everything. For the turkey. Tell him —" She stopped. She didn't know what to tell him. She grabbed her coat off the hook by the door and her green hat and her grandmother's empty hamper. "Tell him thank you for the ride."
She did not wait to hear what Mrs. Pruitt said. She went out through the empty apparatus floor, past the long tables and the paper turkeys and the cat, past the brass pole where Gus Amato's grandchildren had been swinging and shrieking a few hours before, out the side door and past the bronze plaque without looking at it, and into the cold.
She walked home in the dark through the snow, eight blocks, carrying the empty hamper. Behind her, very far away to the east, she could see a faint orange glow on the bottom of the clouds that had gathered again over Quarry Road. She did not look at it. She did not look at it all the way home.
*
The house on Sycamore Street was dark and cold when she let herself in. The furnace had gone out again. She did not turn on the lights. She stood in the front hall in her wet boots with the empty hamper hanging from one hand, and after a while she set it down, and after a while longer she sat down on the little bench beside the telephone table at the foot of the stairs, still in her coat.
It took her some time to realize where she was sitting.
The bench by the telephone. The exact place. She could feel the dip in the cushion where her mother had worn it down over sixteen years of nights. She was sitting in the dark beside the black rotary phone with her hands in her lap, listening — she realized it with a kind of cold horror — listening for sirens. Listening, with every nerve she had, for the sound of trucks coming back down Center Street from the east.