"Why do you keep saying that? You know. You know. How do you know everything?"
He did not answer. He reached up and took the tape out of the recorder and handed it to her, and she held it against her chest, and he took his own tape out of the cardboard box and turned it over in his fingers.
"Play yours," she said.
"Lena—"
"He said there's a part about me. I want to hear it. I want to hear him be embarrassing."
So he put DANNY #144 in the machine. Frank's voice again, warmer, rougher, the voice from the garage, and Lena closed her eyes and listened to her father tell a thirty-year-old man in Washington State about the price of Freon and the Browns' secondary and the new kid in fourth-period shop who'd nearly taken off his thumb on the band saw, and how he was holding Danny to his promise, next Christmas, no excuses, and how the car was waiting for him. And then he said, "And Lena's coming home for Christmas, too, so look sharp, would you. She's a knockout now. Don't make that face, I can hear you making that face from two thousand miles away. She's got a temper like her mother and a heart like a Buick, kid, you could drive that thing into a wall and it'd keep going. She's the best of all of us. Don't tell her I said it. I'm just saying, a man could do worse than to get hit by that girl with a wrench."
Lena laughed out loud, a wet, startled, helpless laugh, and Danny put his hand over his eyes.