She had turned on the single bulb over the workbench and plugged in the little orange space heater that Frank used to keep under the bench for his feet, and it ticked and glowed and did nothing whatsoever about the cold. She was sitting on the tall wooden stool with her coat on this time, a long camel-colored wool coat with the collar turned up, her hair pinned up and coming down, the two presents on the workbench in front of her, side by side, silver and red. She did not turn around when he came in. She was looking at the pegboard.
Everything on the pegboard had its outline. Frank had done that the first year Danny came out to the garage, the summer of 1970, when Danny was fourteen and had been caught by Frank, through the open garage door, trying to steal a set of socket wrenches off this very bench. Frank had not called the police. He had not called Jack Rourke. He had said, sit down, kid, and handed him a can of black spray paint and told him to lay every tool on the pegboard and spray around it, so that the shape stayed behind when the tool was gone. That way, Frank said, a person could see at a glance what was missing. Then he had told Danny to come back Saturday and help him pull an engine, and Danny, mostly out of confusion, had come.
Now the hammers were in their outlines, and the screwdrivers in descending sizes, and the wrenches, and the hacksaw and the level and the tin snips. Only one shape on the whole board was empty: a three-eighths-inch-drive socket wrench, its black silhouette like a shadow without a body.
"The police took it," Lena said, still not turning. "In January. It was in his hand. They have to, I guess, when somebody dies alone. It was in a bag with a tag on it at the station for two weeks, and then they called and said we could come get it, and nobody went." She was quiet a moment. "It's still there, I suppose. In a bag. In a drawer somewhere downtown."
Danny stood by the door with his hands in his coat pockets.
"I'll go get it," he said. "If you want."
She turned around then and looked at him. Her eyes were very dark under the bulb, and she had fixed her makeup, he saw, and he understood that she had done it for this, for the garage, the way some people put on a suit for church.
"Tomorrow's Christmas," she said. "And then you're leaving."