She thought about it, with the blanket around her shoulders and the rain dripping off the porch roof between them like a bead curtain.
"I'll think of something," she said, and went inside, and lit a candle, and checked on the chicken, and lay down on her bed in her clothes and did not sleep at all.
At nine thirty the next morning, in the second-floor conference room of the Corso Brothers building on Chestnut Street, with the presses thumping on the floor below so that the coffee cups shivered in their saucers, Monica Kimball of Jordan Marsh leaned back in her chair, crossed one long leg over the other, folded her hands on her knee, and said, "So, Miss Duarte. Tell me. What's your favorite scene?"
Theda had laid the twenty-two pieces out on black velvet on the table in front of her. The bus brooch, in gold-tone metal with tiny rhinestone headlights. The doughnut earrings, in enamel the color of honey. The hitchhiker's thumb stickpin, which Mr. Corso had said was too strange to sell and which she secretly loved best. The charm bracelet with its tiny trumpet. Beside her, Aldo Corso, in the three-piece suit from his daughter's wedding, sat smiling his Biltmore-sign smile and sweating slightly at the temples.
Theda opened her mouth to say naturally. She felt it come up her throat, smooth and easy, the way it always did, like a coin rolling down a chute.
"I hadn't seen it," she said, "until last night."
Mr. Corso's smile did not move. It merely froze in place, like a picture on a paused tape.
"When we had lunch in September, Mrs. Kimball, you asked me if I'd seen it, and I said naturally, and I hadn't. I say naturally when I don't know things. It's a habit. I designed all of these from a library book of stills." She took a breath. "And then last night I watched it for the first time, on the only copy in Rhode Island, which I had to share with a bus driver, on a couch in a bus garage on Elmwood Avenue, with a night dispatcher who came in for the hitchhiking. And the tape broke four minutes from the end and I had to splice it with Scotch tape. So my favorite scene is the doughnut. Because he does it all wrong. Because he tells her you have to have nerve about it, you can't be too careful, and he's the most careful man in the whole picture. He builds a wall out of a blanket so he won't have to find out what he wants." She looked down at the bracelet, at the trumpet. "And I made the trumpet because the book said the walls fall. But they don't show it. They just let you hear it. I think that's why I'd want to wear it. I'd want people to hear me coming."
There was a silence in the conference room. Below them the presses thumped. Mr. Corso had taken out a handkerchief and was holding it, not using it, as if he were about to surrender.
Monica Kimball uncrossed her legs, leaned forward, and picked up the hitchhiker's thumb.
"A bus garage," she said.
"Elmwood Avenue."
"Who was the bus driver?"
"A man named Nicky. He's playing Clark Gable tomorrow night at a church on Federal Hill. He can't dunk a doughnut."