The house at number 27 smelled the way it had smelled every Christmas Eve of Lena's life, which was to say of hot olive oil and garlic and lemon and something frying, and underneath that the cold green resin smell of the tree, and underneath that the faint permanent ghost of her father's pipe tobacco, which eleven months had not been enough to air out of the drapes. On the hi-fi in the living room a crooner was singing about a white Christmas to nobody in particular. In the den, her brother-in-law Paul was watching the local news, where a weatherman in a sport coat the color of a traffic cone was standing in front of a map of Ohio covered in little cartoon snowflakes and smiling as if he had personally arranged them.
Lena came in the front door, stamped her boots on the mat, and took them off. Her stockings were soaked to the shin. She stood on the braided rug in the front hall and dripped.
"Well," said her sister Theresa from the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel printed with holly. "You look like the before picture in a shampoo commercial."
"Thank you."
"Joey says you were in a snowball fight with Danny Rourke."
"Joey," said Lena, "is a criminal and a liar."
"Were you?"
"Briefly."