She did not want to smile at him, so she didn't, quite. She turned and walked back to the station wagon with as much dignity as a woman can summon while her boots fill with snow. The two presents sat side by side on the hood where she had left them, dusted white, the silver one gone dull under its layer of flakes, the red one spotted with dark wet patches where snow had melted on the paper. She brushed them off with her sleeve, carefully, the way you brush off a child's face, and picked them up and held them against her.
He followed her at a distance. Not close. He seemed to understand, without being told, that something had changed in the last thirty seconds, that whatever had happened by the spruce had ended and something else had begun.
"I saw the car," she said, without turning around. "Loaded. I thought you were leaving."
"Friday morning," he said. "The twenty-sixth. I'm driving Ma down to Sarasota. My aunt Bernie's got a condo by the water and a spare bedroom and a lot of opinions about my mother's smoking. Then I fly home from Tampa on the thirtieth." He nodded at the back of the wagon, where boxes were stacked to the ceiling, a lamp with its shade wrapped in a dry cleaning bag, a set of golf clubs nobody in the Rourke family had ever been known to use. "This is just the stuff she can't stand to put on the truck. Movers came Monday. House closes in January."
"Oh," Lena said.
So she had run across the street in a dress for nothing. There had been two days the whole time. She felt foolish, and then she felt the presents in her arms and did not feel foolish anymore.
She turned around. He was standing by the tailgate with his hands in his coat pockets, snow on his shoulders, the scarf darkened where the snow had soaked it. He looked at the presents and then at her face, and she watched him understand that they were not from her before she said a word.
"These are from my father," she said.