Delia didn't touch it. "You want to give it to Anton."
"I want Anton to have it. I don't know if he wants anything from me, and I understand if he doesn't. I don't know where he is. I tried the Chicago telephone books at the library in Dayton, and he isn't listed, and I didn't —" Her hands closed over the handbag clasp. "I didn't keep anything. That's the truth of it. Don threw out the letters Anton wrote, after, and I let him, and I don't even know if Anton wrote one or four or a hundred. I don't know the man at all. I only know that he loved my son and my son loved him and I stood in a church in Kettering and let a lawyer keep him on the other side of a door."
The kitchen was very quiet. In the living room, Nell's tape had moved on to something with a saxophone.
"I'm not asking you to fix it," Evelyn said. "I'm asking whether you'd help me try to find him. And if he says no, then it's no."
---
Marty, it turned out, was the person who knew.
Evelyn asked him directly, in front of the whole party. He was in the armchair by the window with his glass on his knee.
"He went to Milwaukee," Marty said. "His sister was up there. That was the spring of '92. He stopped by to give back the extra key. He didn't leave an address and I didn't ask for one."
"Do you know the sister's name?"
"I might." Marty looked at her for a long moment. "Mrs. Pell, I'll tell you a thing, and I'm only going to say it once, and then I'll be polite for the rest of the night. I drove Anton to the hospital at three in the morning more times than I can count. I sat with him in the hallway at Masonic when the doctors wouldn't let him in the room because he wasn't family. And then your husband came and took Paul to Ohio and Anton came back here and sat in that apartment with the lights off for a week. I brought him soup. He didn't eat it. So I'll help you, because Paul would have wanted me to, and because I'm sixty-eight and I'm tired of being angry at people I've never met. But if Anton says no, he gets to say no. And nobody in this room gets to make him feel bad about it."
Evelyn did not flinch. She had, Delia thought, been waiting four years for someone to say it to her face.
"That's fair," she said. "That's more than fair."
Marty nodded. "Theresa," he said after a moment. "The sister. Theresa something. Married name. Polish. I'll think of it."
Annette reached over and put her hand on her husband's knee.
---