Carrigan nodded slowly. "She told my father the same thing in 1946," he said. "I was eighteen. I was there." And he went out into the cold.
The cold broke on the day after Christmas. It went out of the valley the way it had come, all at once, and on the morning of the twenty-seventh it was twelve above and the town sounded different, water running in the gutters on Park Street and car doors and dogs and the plows grinding down Montana, and men coming into the Gallus Frame unwinding their scarves and saying, "Jesus, it's warm," and hearing it said back.
Lauren went up to St. James that afternoon with a pasty in waxed paper and the key. Johanna was sitting up in a bed by the window on the third floor with an oxygen tube under her nose and both hands wrapped in white gauze to the second knuckle. The doctors thought she would keep eight of the fingers. They did not know yet about the other two.
"Tiernan was here," Johanna said. "Three times. He sat in that chair and scolded me for an hour, and then he cried, and then he brought me a box of Russell Stover. He's a good man. I told you." She looked at the window. "He's sending Tomo to the nursing home on the Flat. Not Galen. That Orlich woman found him a bed. He hates it. But he's breathing. Arvo's going upstairs over the cafe on Saturday. Mossy's already up there, telling Stevo how to cook."
"I know," Lauren said. "I can hear him through the ceiling."
She took the key out of her coat and held it out. Johanna looked at it, at the string and the little tag in her own brown handwriting, and did not take it.
"There's nothing left to open," she said. "Stu put a new lock on that door. I'm told it's a Yale."
"It's yours."
"It was mine," Johanna said. "It was a long time. I'd like you to have it. I know it doesn't open anything." She closed her bandaged hand gently over Lauren's, around the key. "But you keep it. You'll know if you ever need it. People like us usually do."