It was exactly where they had been standing the afternoon before. She saw him realize it at the same instant she did.
The boys had stopped throwing. The street went quiet. The snow had begun to fall again, softly, and it settled on her hair and on his shoulders and on the two snowballs, which were forgotten, which were dropped.
"Kevin Shea," Danny said, without taking his eyes off her face, "if you throw that thing, I will tell your mother about the Kowalskis' Santa."
From behind the rampart there was a pause, and then the soft sound of a snowball being set down.
Then he kissed her, or she kissed him; neither of them, afterward, could ever agree on which, and they argued about it happily for years. His face was cold and his mouth was warm, and her hands were inside the collar of his black coat, and his were in her hair, which was surely ruined, which she did not care about in the slightest. Behind the wall of snow three nine-year-old boys made a noise of profound and unanimous disgust, and then, after a moment, a ragged cheer, and from the porch of number 27, unmistakably, came the sound of Rosemary Marchetti blowing her nose.
* * *
They finished the Mustang on the second of January, 1987, in an afternoon and a half, with the space heater ticking under the bench and the radio on and Rosemary bringing out coffee every hour on the hour, setting it down on the bench, and staying a little longer each time. The steering box went in like it had been waiting. Danny let Lena tighten the last bolt. The three-eighths-inch socket wrench she used to do it had come back from a drawer downtown in a plastic bag with a tag on it the day before, and when she was done she wiped it off with a rag and hung it in its outline on the pegboard, and the board was whole.