"You'll take nothing," said Filomena. "It's yours. Both of yours. Congratulations, you own a movie. Here." She pushed the cassette across the counter toward them, and then, as an afterthought, pushed the faded box after it, and then, with a sigh, took a white index card out of a drawer and wrote something on it and put it in the box too. "I'll order another one from the distributor. Six weeks. Go on, go, get out of my store. Go figure out who gets it on Christmas."
Out on the sidewalk, under the dark Christmas lights, Theda opened the box and took out the card. In the firm, slanted hand it said: IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. Do not watch alone. You will miss the best part. — F.T.
She showed it to him. He read it and smiled, and then did not quite smile.
"There's something else," she said. "Mr. Corso wants me in New York. The Fifth Avenue showroom. A designer who talks to buyers. The fourth of November."
Something passed over his face, quick, like the shadow of a bus going by a window, and was gone. Then he smiled the big, warm, funeral-and-wedding smile, and it was a very good smile, and she disliked it intensely.
"That's terrific," he said. "Theda, that's great. New York. You'll be great in New York. You should go."
"I haven't decided."
"Sure, sure. But you should. It's your thing, it's what you're good at. You'd be crazy not to." He looked at his watch. "I've got to get to Atwells, Carmela will have my head. Here." He held out the cassette. "You take it. You'll want to show it to people down there. Show your buyers. Tell them about the splice."
She didn't take it.
"Is that sure, sure," she said, "or sure?"
He stood there with the tape held out between them, in the wet blue dusk, with the traffic hissing by on Wickenden Street, and for a second she thought he was going to say something. His mouth even opened. Then he set the cassette very gently on top of the newspaper box beside her, as if setting down a baby on a step, and touched two fingers to his forehead in a kind of salute.
"Break a leg," he said. "Wait. No. That's me. I'm the one who's supposed to break a leg."
"Donnie already did."
"Right," he said. "Right." And he went off up the hill in the rain toward the bus stop, walking fast, the way he had walked the night before, and did not look back once, and she stood on the sidewalk and watched him go with her hands at her sides, and the tape sat on the newspaper box getting rained on until she picked it up.