She found Nicky alone on the empty stage, after everyone had gone out to the cannoli. He was sitting on one of the two cots in his rumpled costume with his fedora on the floor beside him and his tie undone, looking at the army blanket hanging on its clothesline in the half-light, the way he had looked at his hand on the RIPTA blanket on the couch two nights before. On the prop table at the side of the stage, beside a plate of doughnuts and a toy telephone, lay Father Albanese's trumpet, a dented brass thing with a green cord on it.
He looked up. He did not say anything. He seemed, for once, to have run out of things to say.
"You dunked it right," said Theda.
"I went in like I didn't care if it broke." He looked down at his hands. "Funny thing. Turns out I cared a lot."
She came across the stage. She stopped on her side of the blanket, by the other cot, so that the Walls of Jericho hung between them, and she could see only the shape of him through the rough gray wool, lit from behind by the work light in the wings.
"I didn't say naturally," she said to the blanket. "To Mr. Corso. Yesterday. He asked me about New York and I didn't say naturally. I said I wanted to think. I've been thinking since yesterday at ten. I've got two columns on a legal pad and nothing in either one." She took a breath. "That's the truth. I don't know if I'm going. I want to, a little. I'm scared of it a little. And I'm scared I said I'd think about it only because of a man I've known for forty-nine hours, which is the kind of thing a woman ought to be ashamed of in 1985."
On the other side of the blanket, the shape of him had gone very still.
"And you," she said, "said you should go, sure, sure, terrific. Like you were trading a shift. And I want to know whether you meant it, Nicky, because I'm not going to decide anything until I know whether you meant it."
There was a long silence on the stage. Somewhere upstairs in the parish hall, someone dropped a tray and everyone laughed.
"I put in for Saturdays," he said.
"What?"
"Yesterday. After I left you on Wickenden. I went to the garage and I went into the superintendent's office and I put in for Saturdays off. Through the spring. Eleven years I've worked anything they gave me. Holidays, splits, the owl run. Never asked for one thing. Sure, sure. Yesterday I asked." He stopped. "So I meant it. You should go if you want to go. That part's true. But I didn't say the rest of it, because the rest of it is me asking for something, and I'm not any good at that, I've had no practice. The rest of it is, I want to be the guy on the Saturday train to New York with the tape in his coat. Every Saturday. Or, if you stay, I want to be the guy on Brook Street with the tape in his coat. Either one. I don't care which. I care a lot. That's the island in the Pacific. That's what I want. I never said it out loud before."
Theda stood for a moment on her side of the blanket with her hands at her sides.
Then she went to the prop table and picked up Father Albanese's trumpet.