At eleven o'clock, Central Time, the room fell quiet without anyone deciding it should. Annette had turned on the little television on the bookshelf with the sound down, and in New York the ball was dropping, and Dick Clark was mouthing numbers, and everyone looked, not at the television, but at the white phone on the wall by the kitchen door.
It didn't ring. Of course it didn't ring. The person who called at eleven was sitting on the futon with a ginger ale in her hand.
Evelyn looked at the phone too. Then she set her glass on the floor and stood and crossed the room to it and stood in front of it, small, in her good navy dress, and after a moment she lifted the receiver and dialed — long distance, the 1, the 513, the seven digits — and stood with it pressed to her ear.
In Dayton, Delia knew, a phone was ringing in an empty kitchen beside a parish calendar.
Evelyn let it ring nine times. Then she hung up, gently, and turned around.
"Paul used to do that," she said. "When Don wouldn't come to the phone. He'd say, Mom, I'm calling the house anyway, so the house knows. It's foolish." She smoothed her dress. "Happy New Year, Dayton."
Nobody laughed, but it was the kind of not-laughing that holds you up.
---
Nell had to go at a quarter past eleven; she worked the overnight board at a rock station on Michigan Avenue, running commercials and the seven-second delay. She kissed Delia and then, after a pause, Evelyn, on the cheek, and said to Ronnie, "Listen at midnight," and pulled on her hat.
Faye's pager went off at eleven-forty. She looked at it, sighed, said, "Mrs. Okonkwo, eight centimeters, God bless her," and kissed everyone, including Sam twice, and went down the stairs at a speed that suggested a woman who had done this many times in boots.
Which left six: Sam and Delia, the Golds, Ronnie, Evelyn.
At eleven fifty-eight, Sam opened the champagne, and the cork hit the ceiling and bounced off one of the silver balloons, and the 6 swung on its ribbon and turned its face to the room. Ronnie turned up the boombox, which Nell had left tuned to the station, and they heard the jock counting down, and they counted with him, ten, nine, eight, and Delia found herself standing next to Sam by the window without having walked there.
*Three. Two.*
She looked up at him. He was looking at her. The gold hat was still on her head. She had forgotten it was there.
*One.*