Rosemary looked at her then, for the first time since she'd come in from the snow. Her eyes were very pale blue and very steady.
"Bringing him what."
"Dad left something for him. In the garage. I found it on Sunday." She swallowed. "He left something for me too. They're together. He wanted us to open them together."
There was a long silence. On the hi-fi in the living room the record had ended and the needle was hissing softly in the run-out groove, around and around, and nobody got up to lift it.
"In the garage," Rosemary said.
"In the trunk of the Mustang."
Rosemary's face did not change, exactly. But something behind it closed, the way a door closes quietly at the far end of a long house, and Lena heard it.
"That car," Rosemary said. "That boy and that car." She picked up her fork again and looked at her plate. "Your father was out in that garage every night for four years with that boy. Every night, and every Saturday, and Sundays after Mass, while I kept his dinner warm on a plate with tin foil on it. Teaching him things. Keeping him out of trouble, he said. Somebody's got to, he said, Jack Rourke sure won't. And then that boy gets on a bus in the middle of the night and doesn't come back for twelve years, and your father goes out there every Saturday anyway, alone, tinkering at that car, finishing it for him, he said. For when Danny comes home." She cut a smelt in half. "And one Saturday he doesn't come in for his sandwich."