"Negative," he said. "Disregard."
He turned back to her. The rain was coming harder now. It was running off the brim of his hat. It was soaking through the shoulders of her coat; she could feel the cold of it reach her skin in two places, like hands.
"Why don't you get in the car," he said. "Out of the rain. Back seat. I'm not arresting you. It's just dry."
"I do not sit in the back of police cars," Solange said.
"Ma'am—"
"I have never sat in the back of a police car in my life," she said, "and I am fifty-six years old, and I am not going to start tonight on Ridge Road because the Lincoln did not come."
They stood there. Between them the rain came down through the beam of the spotlight in long silver threads. Somewhere up the hill, at the top of the road, past the place where it went into the trees, past the turn onto Quarry Lane, there was a window, and in the window there was a chair, and in the chair there was a man who had heard the horn at the Bedford Road crossing at twelve-twenty-one and who had been waiting ever since for the sound of a car door, or footsteps on the porch, or a key in the lock. It was twelve-forty-seven now. He would be fine, and he would be sitting in that chair with his blanket on the floor and his bad hand in his lap, listening, and he would hear nothing, and he would know, the way he knew the crossings, the way he knew where every train on the line was to a quarter mile, that something had gone wrong.
She looked at the box on the wall, under her hand, the brown paper going dark in spots where the rain had found it.
She thought: the paper will soak through. Then the white box. Then the blue box. Mr. Melamed made the part himself. Six weeks.