Peg withdrew, the cord retracting behind her through the door like a tape measure. Danny looked at Lena. Lena looked at the presents.
"It says Christmas Eve," she said. "It says together."
"It does."
"I'm not opening it in your mother's living room with your aunt Bernie on the phone."
"No."
"And I'm not opening it in my mother's." She did not explain that. She didn't have to. He only nodded, as if he had expected it.
"The garage," he said.
She hesitated. The garage was the place where her father had died, on an ordinary Saturday in January with the radio on and a socket wrench in his hand, and her mother had found him there at noon when he didn't come in for his sandwich. The garage was the place Lena had sat on Sunday in the cold front seat of an unfinished car and cried so hard she frightened herself. It was also the place where, every Saturday of her childhood, her father had stood under the bare bulb with grease to his elbows and whistled through his teeth, and where, for four years of her adolescence, she had watched him do it through the kitchen window with this man beside him instead of her.