The radio jock yelled something unprintable that would have cost them their license if Nell hadn't been sitting on the delay. Out on Clark Street someone set off a string of firecrackers and somebody's car alarm went off in response. Annette kissed Marty. Ronnie kissed the air in the direction of Michigan Avenue.
And Sam bent his head, slightly, a question, and Delia —
Across the room, Evelyn Pell was standing alone by the bookshelf, with her ginger ale, looking at the white phone on the wall. She was not crying. She was standing very straight. She was, Delia understood, standing in her son's living room at midnight with a room full of people in it, which was exactly what she had asked for, and it was costing her everything she had.
Delia put her hand flat on Sam's chest, just for a moment. She felt his heart under the cables of the sweater. Then she stepped back and went to Evelyn and put her arm around her, and the two of them stood there, and Evelyn said, "Oh, dear, you shouldn't," and leaned into her anyway.
On the radio, the jock said, "And this one's going out from our board op to the second floor on Clark Street — Delia, she says you know why," and the first bars of "Auld Lang Syne" came out of the boombox, not the Guy Lombardo version, but some scratchy old recording with a single piano, and Ronnie put a hand over her mouth.
When Delia looked back across the room, Sam was refilling everyone's glasses. He caught her eye and lifted his glass to her, the way he had in 1991, a toast across a room. He didn't look hurt. He looked like a man who had seen exactly what she'd done and understood it and would have done the same thing, and that was worse, somehow, than if he'd been hurt.
III. After
Sam drove Evelyn back to her hotel at one-thirty in his work van, because no taxi was going to come to Clark Street on New Year's night and because he was the kind of man who drove old women to hotels. When he came back the Golds had gone upstairs and Ronnie had gone to meet Nell at the end of her shift, and the apartment was a field of cups.
They cleaned up without talking much. That was a thing they had always done well. He washed and she dried, because he hated drying and she hated the feeling of wet bread crusts in a drain. The radio was still on, low. At some point she realized she still had the gold hat on, and she took it off and set it on the windowsill above the sink, where it looked like a tiny lighthouse.
"I'm sorry," she said, at the end, to the dish towel.
"For what?"
"You know for what."
He pulled the plug and the sink drained with an undignified gurgle. He dried his hands on his trousers, which drove her crazy and which she would miss, she thought suddenly, if he ever stopped coming.
"You did the right thing," he said. "She needed you more."
"That's not — " She stopped. "That's not a ranking."