"I don't know that yet either," she said.
They walked to the car. At the driver's door she took out the key and looked at it, and then she held it out to him, and his face lit up as if he were five again.
"Can I?"
"Go ahead."
He fit the key into the lock with great care and turned it, the way she had taught him, gently, and there was the pause, and then all around the car, in the blue evening by the lake, every lock button rose at once, and the car let out its long breath.
"It sighed," Kenan said, satisfied, as he always said, and ran around to the other side to get in.
She sat behind the wheel. She put the key in and turned it to the second position, and the small orange light came on, and she sat and waited for it in the quiet, with her son buckling himself in beside her and talking already about a goal he had almost scored. The medal sat beside the clock, where it had sat for thirty-seven years, where two men had touched it every day and a third had touched it once, an hour ago, without meaning to.
She had never touched it. She looked at it a long moment, at the dark brass and the one bright rim.
Then she reached out, the way you would reach to touch the shoulder of a guest who has fallen asleep in your house, and laid one fingertip on the edge of it, lightly, just for the length of the light. For them, she thought. Until they decide.
The light went out. She turned the key, and the engine caught on the second turn, the way it always did, and she drove her son home.