It came down the alley behind East Broad very slowly, the way you drive when you don't want anyone to know you are there, which with that engine was impossible. The Corvette. Top up this time. It rolled to a stop at the mouth of the bay, and the engine shut off, and for a long moment nobody got out.
Then Win Conway opened the door, the cracked door, and stood up.
His eye was worse. It had gone from plum to something closer to eggplant, swollen almost shut, with a yellowish rim at the edges. The split on his cheekbone had scabbed. He was not wearing the white polo shirt. He was wearing a gray T-shirt that said SAINT IGNATIUS CREW on it and a pair of old jeans, and without the sunglasses and the polo shirt and the clean country club voice he looked like what he was, a seventeen-year-old kid who had not slept.
He saw us all standing there. He stopped.
"I didn't know you'd be here," he said.
"I'm always here," said Hutch.
"I meant them." Win looked at Dennis, then at me, then at Mr. Okonski, and his face did that tightening thing again, a man stepping onto ice. "I came to ask about the door. I've heard you're the best in the county. I was going to ask what it would cost."
"Your father already told us what it costs," said Mr. Okonski. His voice was perfectly flat. "He told Mrs. Haydu last night. Eleven hundred dollars."
Win closed his good eye for a second. When he opened it, he said, "He shouldn't have called you."
"But he did."
"He did." Win took a breath. "Mr. Okonski, I'm not here for your money. I'm not here for anybody's money. I came because I'm trying to figure out if this can be fixed before Wednesday, and I don't have eleven hundred dollars, and my father doesn't either."
It was such a strange thing to hear, standing in Hutch Vukovich's shop on a Sunday, that for a second none of us understood it. The Conways not having eleven hundred dollars. The Conways, who had the dealership on Route 57 with the inflatable gorilla on the roof every Fourth of July, and the house on Washington Avenue with the columns, and the commercials on WEOL.
Hutch was the first to understand. Hutch had been in business in Elyria for thirty years. "What happens Wednesday?" he said.
Win looked at the cracked door for a long moment, and then, I think, decided that there was no point anymore in being anybody but who he was.