"Ma—"
"Get out of my husband's garage." Her voice did not rise. It did not need to. "You took enough of his time. Four years of nights. Twelve years of Saturdays. Every Saturday out here alone in the cold with that car, for you, finishing it for you, and you couldn't be bothered to come home. Not once. Not even to bury him." She drew a breath that shook. "He died on that floor. Right there. Working on your car."
Danny looked at her for what felt like a long time. Lena waited for him to say it. She did not know yet what it was, but she could see it standing in his face like a man behind a curtain, and she waited for him to step out from behind it and say it.
He didn't. He nodded, once, as if Rosemary had told him something he already knew and agreed with. He picked up his tape and put it in his coat pocket, and he did not touch the steering box. He walked past Lena's mother in the doorway, turning sideways so as not to brush against her, and went out the side door, lifting it on its hinges and shouldering it, and was gone into the snow.
"Ma," Lena said. "Ma, you don't understand, the tape—"
But Rosemary had already turned around, and gone back into the house, and closed the breezeway door very softly behind her, which was so much worse than if she had slammed it.
Lena did not go to Midnight Mass. Theresa and Paul took Rosemary, and Joey fell asleep in the back of their Buick on the way and had to be carried in. Lena sat alone in the dark in the den in her father's chair, with the colored lights of the tree making slow shapes on the ceiling, and listened to her tape again on her Walkman with the little foam headphones, and then again, until she could have recited it, and around one in the morning she got up and went to the front window. Across the street every light in the Rourke house was out except one gold rectangle upstairs. It stayed on until she gave up and went to bed.