"You were going to."
"I was going to say," Theresa said carefully, "that Dad would like that."
Lena went upstairs before her face could do anything about that.
Her old bedroom had been redecorated by her mother in 1983 into what Rosemary Marchetti called the guest room and what everyone else called the shrine. The walls were still the pale lavender Lena had chosen at fourteen, though the posters were gone, replaced by a framed print of a lighthouse and a wall calendar from the Larkfield Savings & Loan. Her high school diploma hung over the dresser. The bed had a ruffled spread. On the nightstand sat a clock radio with fat orange numbers and, beside it, the Polaroid camera she had brought from her apartment, a gray plastic box that ejected its pictures with a wheeze like an old man sitting down.
She set the presents on the bed, side by side, silver and red, and stood looking at them.
Then she peeled off the wet stockings and the wet dress, toweled her hair, pinned it up, put on a pair of wool slacks and a dark green sweater with shoulder pads that made her look, Theresa had once said, like she was about to fire someone. She fixed her eyes where the snow had melted the liner. She did it quickly and without thinking, the way she did six faces every weekday afternoon at the television station in Cleveland, the anchors and the weatherman and the sports guy and whatever city councilman or high school principal or man who owned a talking parrot had been booked for the five o'clock news. Base, powder, a little contour so the studio lights wouldn't flatten them, a little color so they wouldn't look dead. She was good at it. Everyone said she was good at it. The weatherman in the traffic cone jacket was hers. Most nights she watched the broadcast from the hallway outside the studio, the way a painter might stand at the back of a gallery, and felt a small, private, mostly respectable satisfaction.
From her purse, folded in thirds, she took out a letter and read it again, though she knew it by heart.
It was typed on heavy cream paper under a letterhead that said HOLLIS & CRANE MAKEUP EFFECTS — BURBANK, CALIFORNIA, and it said, in the dry language of people who were not in the habit of wasting words, that Mr. Walter Hollis had reviewed the portfolio of photographs she had submitted in the spring, apologized for the delay in his reply, and would be pleased to offer her a position as an apprentice in the studio's lab beginning the second week of February, 1987, at a weekly salary that was a little less than half of what she made now, and that he would appreciate her reply by the second of January.