"No, ma'am," Danny said. "He'd have understood. He always did."
"Well," said Rosemary, "he was a better person than me," and she took her hands away and turned briskly for the door. "Come in. There's cannoli. And afterward you're going to tell me exactly what that steering thing costs, because if he spent more than forty dollars on it I'm going to dig him up and kill him."
They had gone four steps toward the porch when the ambush came.
It came from the Sheas' side yard, where the boys had spent all afternoon building, and it turned out that what they had been building was not a fort but a launch platform, a long wall of packed snow with a row of snowballs lined up on top like cannonballs on a rampart, dozens of them, glazed with water and frozen hard by the dusk. Three pom-poms rose above the wall. Somebody yelled "NOW," in the voice of a boy who had seen too many war movies, and the air filled with white.
Lena shrieked. Danny pulled her down behind the Buick. Rosemary, with the instincts of a woman who had raised two daughters on a street full of boys, retreated up the steps into the doorway with a dignity that was not in the least diminished by the snowball that caught her squarely on the backside, and from the safety of the storm door called, "Joseph Francis, you are grounded until Easter!" and then, a second later, laughing despite herself, "Get him, Lena!"
So they did. They came up from behind the Buick together and gave as good as they got, Lena packing and Danny throwing, Danny packing and Lena throwing, the boys howling and returning fire from behind their rampart, Paul and Theresa on the porch now with Rosemary, cheering for no one in particular, and Joey's Polaroid going off in Theresa's hands with a flash and a wheeze. The colored lights blinked along the gutters of every house on Holloway Lane. Up and down the street, front doors were opening and people were coming out onto their porches in their sweaters to see what all the noise was, and Mr. Kowalski was shouting something about the township.
Lena ran out of ammunition. She broke from behind the car for the bank of snow by the Rourkes' blue spruce, and Danny broke at the same moment for the same bank from the other direction, and they arrived at it together, and stopped, chest to chest, in the middle of the yard, each with a snowball raised, breathing hard.