"It wasn't me!" called a voice from behind the Sheas' hedge, a voice that cracked in the middle and came out the other side half an octave lower. Joey DeLuca was thirteen and had grown four inches since the summer and was, his mother said, impossible.
"It's never you," Danny said, and Lena laughed, and her laugh went up into the blue air over the street like it belonged there.
Later, after the fishes, after the cannoli, after Rosemary had fallen asleep in Frank's chair in the den with her reading glasses on her chest and the tree lights making slow shapes on the ceiling, Lena and Danny went out to the garage. It was cold. The pegboard was whole. The old gray Panasonic sat on the shelf over the bench where it had always been.
Lena took it down. She put in a new tape, still stiff from its cellophane, and wrote on the label in blocky capitals that were not quite her father's but were not far off: DAD #1 — CHRISTMAS 1990.
She sat on the stool. Danny stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, the way Frank used to stand behind him at the open hood of a car, not doing anything, only there. She held the little silver microphone close and looked at it for a long moment, and outside the snow came down past the window over the bench, slow and enormous, the way it had once, and the little red light on the recorder glowed in the dark like an ember somebody had kept going all night against the cold.
She pressed RECORD.
"Hi, Dad," she said. "It's me. We're home."