He made a sound then, a short hard sound in his throat, and pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth, and held it there.
She let him. She looked at the window and let him. She had sat beside a great many people in a great many rooms in the minutes when there was nothing to say, and she had learned that the only thing to do in those minutes was to be a person sitting there, and not to touch them unless they reached for you, and not to fill the silence with anything, because the silence was doing work. After a while he took his hand down.
She opened her door. The cold came in, and the sound of the rain on the roof of the car got louder. She got out and stood in the road and then turned around and bent down and looked at him across the seat.
She held out the box.
He looked at it. He did not take it.
"He will want to wind it himself," she said. "The first time. But he cannot do it with one hand. Somebody has to hold it still for him while he turns the crown. Thirty turns." She paused. "Not more."
"I know," he said. "I know. Thirty."
"Then you know." She waited. He did not reach for it, and she did not take it back. She leaned in and set it on the passenger seat where she had been sitting, on the warm place she had left, the damp brown paper and the red-and-white string, and straightened up again. "I am going to put the kettle on," she said. "The door will not be locked. The porch light switch is backwards. Up is off."
She closed the car door, gently, the way you close a door on a sleeping room.