"I could change the flight," he said slowly. "I could put Ma on a plane to Sarasota, Bernie could pick her up. I could drive the wagon back up from Florida instead of flying. I could be back here by New Year's." He stopped. "If someone needed a steering box put in. If somebody's mother would let me in the garage."
"Somebody's mother," Lena said, "has already set a place."
She dropped the snowball at his feet. It landed on the toe of his shoe and broke apart. Then she put her cold hand in his cold hand, and they stood there a moment longer at the top of the hill, with the town spread out below them in the dark, every street strung with colored lights like the instructions on a map, and then they went down the hill together, two lines of footprints, toward the cars.
* * *
Rosemary Marchetti was waiting at the front door of number 27 with the porch light on, wearing her good cardigan over her apron. She watched the station wagon pull up to the curb across the street, and Paul's Buick pull into the driveway, and the tall man in the black coat cross the snow behind her daughter, and stop at the bottom of the porch steps, and look up at her.
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Rosemary came down the steps in her house slippers, into the snow, and put both hands on Danny Rourke's face, the way she had once put them on her daughters' faces to check for fever.
"You're frozen," she said. "Where's your hat? You never had a hat. Eighteen years old, never once a hat." Her thumbs moved on his cheekbones. "I'm sorry, Danny. I'm so sorry, honey. He would have been so ashamed of me."