"No," he agreed. "It's just a fact about midnight." He picked up his coat from the back of the chair. At the door he turned. "Delia. I'm going to ask you again sometime. Why you keep inviting me. And I'd like it if you answered."
"Ask me next year," she said, and heard how it sounded — like a joke, like a deflection, like every step backward she had ever taken — and wished she could reach out and take it out of the air.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled, a little tiredly.
"That's a long time to wait for a sentence," he said, and went down the stairs.
---
Marty remembered the sister's name on January ninth, at six in the morning, and called Delia to tell her, waking her up. "Kaminski. Theresa Kaminski. It came to me in the shower. I'm almost sure."
There were eleven Kaminskis in the Milwaukee phone book, which Delia found on the third floor of the Harold Washington Library in a row of out-of-town directories with broken spines. Two were T. Kaminski. One was a deaf, delighted old man named Thaddeus. The other was a recording: *You have reached Tom and Theresa and the boys, please leave a message after the tone.*
Delia hung up the pay phone without leaving one. She stood in the library lobby with her quarters in her hand and found that she was shaking.
She called Sam from the same phone. It was a Tuesday and he was on a job in Pilsen, so she paged him, punching in the library's pay phone number and then 911 after it, which was the code they had agreed on in 1993, after Lake Shore Drive, for *not an emergency but please.* He called back in eight minutes from a contractor's trailer.
"I found her," Delia said. "I think. The sister. I didn't say anything."
"Okay."
"I don't know who I am in this. Hi, I'm the woman who lives in your brother's late partner's apartment, his mother would like a word."
There was a pause on the line full of the sound of a circular saw.
"You could say that," Sam said. "It's true. Or you could write a letter. People like a letter. You can put it down and pick it back up."
She wrote the letter. It took four drafts. She mailed it to Theresa Kaminski with a self-addressed stamped envelope and her phone number and a sentence, in the last draft, that she had copied from something Marty said: *If he says no, he gets to say no.*