On the kitchen table behind him, beside the cheap cardboard Christmas tree his mother had bought at the drugstore because the real decorations were already on a truck somewhere in Tennessee, sat a shoebox. It was a Thom McAn shoebox, size eleven, the lid soft with handling, and inside it, standing on end in neat rows like books on a shelf, were one hundred and forty-three cassette tapes. Most of them were TDK, the cheap gray ones Frank bought in three-packs at the Revco. A few were Maxell, from the year Frank decided that the cheap ones were stretching and ruining his voice and that a man with something to say ought to say it on decent tape. Every label was written in the same blocky chalkboard capitals. DANNY #1 — OCT 1974. DANNY #17. DANNY #58 — THE ONE ABOUT THE TRANSMISSION. DANNY #100!!! DANNY #143 — DEC 1985.
He had brought them all. He had told himself he brought them because they would be safer with him than in a storage unit in Port Townsend while he was away, which was a lie of the kind he was good at telling himself. He had brought them because he could not leave them.
He had listened to number 143 so many times in the last eleven months that he no longer needed the tape. Frank's voice in December of last year, a little hoarse, the television going in the background, Rosemary calling something from the kitchen. So, kid. You're coming home next Christmas, you said. I'm going to hold you to that. I've got a little something put away for you, and I'm not mailing it, I want to see your face. And the car. Well. The car's going to need you, Danny. I'll tell you about it when you get here. I've had the hood up so long the neighbors think I'm living in it.
Then a little laugh, and the click of the button, and hiss.
Danny looked at the clock on the stove. It was eight-fifteen. Across the street, in the window over the Marchettis' kitchen sink, a shape moved back and forth, back and forth, washing dishes.
He went upstairs and found a dry shirt and a dry sweater and came back down and put on the overcoat, which still had a dark wet blot on the chest where her snowball had hit. He looked at the blot in the hall mirror for a while. Then he wound the scarf around his neck and turned off the light in the kitchen.
"Danny?" His mother's voice came down the stairs, blurred with whisky and heat. "You going over there?"
"Just for a little while, Ma."