"The Red Sox were eliminated in August," Filomena said, putting on a raincoat the color of her cardigan. "Amadeu watches the tapes of the old games. He's watching the 1975 Series. Game six. He watches it every night until they win. They never win." She switched off the register. "I'm sorry, kids. Store closes at nine. I've got a husband to drive home and a pot of kale soup that's been on since four. Go on. Out."
Then they were outside on the narrow wet sidewalk under the dripping awning, and the Christmas lights went dark above them one strand at a time, and Filomena and her husband, a small, gentle man in a Red Sox cap who nodded at them both as if they were old friends, climbed into a brown Buick and drove off down toward the river with a long hiss of tires.
The rain came down. A car went by on Wickenden with one headlight.
Nicky DeLuca turned the tape over in his hands, thinking. Theda stood on her one shoe and her one stocking and waited, without much hope, for whatever he was going to say. She was, she was aware, at his mercy, and she disliked being at anyone's mercy, and she disliked even more that his mercy seemed to be a real and visible thing, the way some people's patience is visible, a kind of gentleness around the mouth.
"Okay," he said finally. "I know a VCR."
"Whose?"
"The Authority's."
"What authority?"
"The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority," he said. "At the Elmwood Avenue garage. There's a break room for the drivers. Twenty-five-inch Zenith on a rolling cart and a top-loading Panasonic they use for the safety films. Defensive Driving and You. The Courteous Operator. There's one about what to do if somebody gets on with a goat. Nobody watches anything on it after eight o'clock at night because the night guys are all out on their routes. There's a couch. It's not a good couch. But it's a couch."
"You want me to go to a bus garage," said Theda, "at nine o'clock at night, with a man I met four minutes ago."
"Twelve minutes. I'm counting from the hands. And you'd be going to a bus garage with a man and a night dispatcher named Cosmo Zito who is sixty-eight years old and has been married to the same woman since the Truman administration and who carries pictures of his grandchildren in his shirt pocket so he can show them to you whether you ask or not. It's the safest room in Providence. There's a fire extinguisher every eleven feet. It's regulation."
"How would we even get there?"
He looked at his watch, a heavy steel thing with a scratched face. "The last Elmwood bus leaves the plaza at nine forty. It'll drop us practically at the garage door. If we walk fast, we make it."
"You want to take a bus," said Theda, "to a bus garage, to watch a movie about a bus."
He considered this. A drop of rain ran off the end of his nose.