Lena opened hers.
There was a Rand McNally road atlas, the 1986 edition, with a family in a convertible on the cover waving at a mountain. Lying on top of it was a ring with two keys, an ignition key and a trunk key, both new and bright, and a small round brass tag stamped with her initials. And there was a cassette. LENA #1.
She opened the atlas without knowing why. It fell open by itself to the map of the whole country, the two big pages with the interstates running across them in red and blue, and someone had taken a yellow highlighter and drawn a line. It started at Cleveland. It went west along I-80 through Indiana and Illinois and Iowa and Nebraska, through Wyoming and down across Utah, and then it bent south and crossed the desert and came to a stop at a dot on the coast where, in her father's blocky capitals, crammed into the blue of the Pacific, it said: HERE, KIDDO.
She put her hand over her mouth.
On the shelf over the bench, where it had always been, sat Frank's old Panasonic shoebox recorder, gray plastic with a carrying handle and a built-in microphone like a little silver grille, the one he had used for twelve years of tapes. Danny reached up and took it down without asking. He checked the batteries the way you'd check a pulse, pressed EJECT, and the little door opened with a click. Then he looked at her.
"Yours," he said. "Ladies first. He'd insist."
She gave him the tape. Her hand shook. He put it in and closed the door and pressed PLAY, and the machine whirred, and there was a hiss, and a clunk as of a microphone being set down on a table, and then a cough, and then her father.
"Okay. Is this thing going? The little wheels are going. Okay." A clearing of the throat. The television in the background, the sound of a crowd, a basketball game. "Hi, Lena-bean. It's your old man. It's December twenty-sixth, 1985, and I'm in the den with the door shut, and your mother thinks I'm doing a Danny tape, so if she asks, I was doing a Danny tape.