"I'm going to be late," my mother said. "Mrs. Wozniak's waiting." She kissed the top of my head. "Don't do anything tonight. We'll talk in the morning."
She went out. I heard Mrs. Wozniak's Buick pull away. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the Band-Aid tin on top of the refrigerator, where it had lived since May.
Three hundred and nine dollars and thirty-five cents.
I did not sleep much that night. Around two in the morning I got up and sat on the back steps in my shorts and listened to the trains on the Norfolk and Western line and the far-off rumble of the mill, which ran all night even now, even on short weeks, like a heart that did not know what the rest of the body was doing. I thought about Dennis's hand, and the cast, and the way he had said Oh. I thought about the crack in the Corvette's door, and Win's face when he saw it. No, no, no. I thought about what Mr. Okonski had said in the waiting room. You going to let that be for nothing.
I thought about January.
And I thought, for the first time, about the license plate on the Corvette. DEALER. Not Win's car. Not a birthday present for the dealer's son. A demonstrator. A car that belonged to the bank, really, the way every new car on a dealer's lot belongs to the bank until somebody buys it, though I did not know that yet. I only knew that Win had looked at that crack like a boy looking at a broken window in somebody else's house, and that somewhere in that look was a thing I did not understand, and I wanted to.
In the morning, I took the Band-Aid tin down from the refrigerator and put it in the front pocket of my good pants, and went to the nine o'clock Mass at Saint Casimir's with Fritzie, and did not hear a word of the homily.
Vukovich Collision was closed on Sundays, but Hutch Vukovich was always there anyway. Everybody knew it. He was a widower in his sixties who lived in the apartment above the shop and said that the only difference between Sunday and Monday was that on Sunday nobody called him on the telephone to ask when their Buick would be ready. When Dennis and his father and I walked up the alley behind East Broad a little after noon, the big bay door was rolled halfway up, and inside, under the hanging lights, Hutch was sanding the quarter panel of a Ford Thunderbird by hand, slowly, the way some men pray.