The kitchen had gone completely silent. On the counter the coffee percolator gave a single small gulp.
Rosemary put down her fork.
She sat with her hands in her lap for a long moment, looking at her grandson. Then she looked at Lena, really looked, for the first time since the garage, and Lena saw that her mother's eyes were red-rimmed and swollen in a way that no makeup on earth could have hidden, and understood that her mother had not slept either.
Lena got up from the table, went upstairs, and came back down with the Walkman and the cassette that said LENA #1. She set them beside her mother's plate.
"He wanted you to know," she said. "He just ran out of time to tell you. Side A. It's not long."
Rosemary looked at the Walkman as though it were an animal that might bite. Then she picked it up, and the tape, and without a word she left the table and went upstairs, and they heard the bedroom door close.
She was gone for an hour and ten minutes. Paul cleared the plates. Theresa washed. Joey sat at the table with his boat. Lena stood at the front window and watched the light go long and gold and then blue across the snow, and watched the Rourke house, and the station wagon at the curb with its wood-grain sides catching the last of the sun, and the three pom-pom hats on the far side of the street, where the boys had been building something for most of the afternoon, conferring and pointing and glancing at number 27.