Something happened in his face then. It was not dramatic. A man who has learned to keep his face still for a living, or for a life, does not let much out. But the corner of his mouth that had gone up so easily a few minutes earlier went down, and he looked away, at the street, at the Kowalskis' drunken Santa, at nothing.
"I found them on Sunday," Lena said. "My mother finally asked me to start on the garage. She hasn't been out there. Not once since January. I don't think she's even opened the side door. So I went out with a box of trash bags and a thermos of coffee and I was going to be brave about it, and I lasted about ten minutes, and then I went and sat in the Mustang because it was the only place to sit." She took a breath. "They were in the trunk. Wrapped in a blanket. With this."
She shifted the presents in her arms so that he could see the tag. It was a plain white tag of the kind sold in packets at the drugstore, punched and threaded onto the loose gold ribbon, and on it, in the blocky capital letters of a man who had spent thirty years writing on chalkboards, was written:
LENA & DANNY — CHRISTMAS EVE, 1986.
OPEN TOGETHER. NO PEEKING. EITHER OF YOU.
— DAD
He came closer to read it. She let him. He read it twice, his lips moving slightly on the second time, and then he stood very still with snow landing on his dark hair.
"He wrapped them last year," she said. "The day after Christmas. You know how he was, about the sales. He bought next year's presents on the twenty-sixth, every year, and wrapped them that same night and hid them, and spent eleven months being smug about it. My mother used to say he was the only man in Ohio who finished his Christmas shopping before he took down the tree." Her voice did something on the last word. She waited until it stopped. "This is the silver one. That's yours. The red one's mine."