"I know how he was about the sales," Danny said quietly.
She looked at him. He was still looking at the tag.
"He found the receipts in my glove box once," he said. "In seventy-three. Some cheap thing I'd bought my mother at Woolworth's the week before Christmas. He gave me a twenty-minute lecture on retail markup. In the cold. With the hood up."
"That sounds like him."
"Everything sounds like him," Danny said. "That's the problem."
They stood there. The boys had regrouped on the far side of the street and were watching from behind the Sheas' station wagon, which was not wood-paneled and therefore of no account, three pom-poms bobbing above the hood.
"You weren't at the funeral," Lena said.
She had not meant to say it like that, flat, the way you set down something heavy. She had meant to save it, to say something cold and adult about it later. But it had been sitting in her throat for eleven months, and it came out.