Then nothing, for seven weeks.
During those seven weeks Delia went to work, transcribing a fraud trial at the Daley Center, and came home, and talked to Evelyn on the phone on Sunday nights after eleven, when the long-distance rates went down. It was the first time they had ever talked on a night that wasn't the last of the year. It was strange at first, like seeing your teacher at the grocery store. Then it wasn't. Evelyn had opinions about the Bulls and about Delia's mother, whom she had decided to dislike on Delia's behalf.
And Sam came over. Not for parties. On a Thursday in January he came to fix the bathroom fan, which did not need fixing. In February he came with a pizza from a place on Ashland and they watched the Bulls beat the Knicks and he did not mention the question. On Valentine's Day neither of them called the other, very carefully, as if a phone call that day would have been a structural load the building couldn't bear.
The letter came back on the first of March. It was in the self-addressed envelope Delia had sent. Inside was a sheet of yellow legal paper with a phone number in Milwaukee written on it, and one line, in a hand Delia did not recognize, a slanted, hurried, left-handed hand:
*I'll talk to you. Not to her. Not yet. — A.F.*
---
Anton Ferrante met them at a diner on Kinnickinnic Avenue in Bay View, on the south side of Milwaukee, on a Saturday in March when the lake was still frozen at the edges and the sky was the color of a sink. Sam drove. He had a reason to be in Milwaukee anyway, he said; his father's business was up there, Brennan & Sons Electric, on Lincoln Avenue, and his father had been asking him to come up for a month. He didn't say why. Delia didn't ask. She was too nervous to ask anything.
Anton was in a booth at the back when they came in, and she knew him at once from the photograph, though he was eight years older than the man laughing with his eyes closed. He was in his mid-forties, with gray at the temples and reading glasses on a cord around his neck, and a pair of hands that he kept folded on the Formica as if they were something he had been asked to hold for someone else. He taught piano, it turned out, and directed the choir at a Lutheran church four blocks from the diner. He lived with a man named Gil who repaired clocks.
"I'm going to tell you some things," he said, after the coffee came, "because you wrote a decent letter and because Theresa said I owed you the courtesy, and Theresa is usually right. And then you're going to drive back to Chicago and tell Evelyn Pell whatever you think is right to tell her. All right?"
"All right," Delia said.
He told them. He told them about meeting Paul at a Christmas party in 1983, Paul in a paper crown even then. He told them how Paul had painted the kitchen yellow without asking the landlord. He told them about the diagnosis in 1988, the hallway at Masonic, Marty's soup, the call to Dayton. He told them about the lawyer's letter, which he still had, which he kept in a drawer with his passport, because he wanted, he said, to be able to put his hand on it whenever he was tempted to forgive.
"I wrote her," he said. "Evelyn. Three times. Don sent them back unopened. After the third one I stopped. I figured that was her answer."
"It wasn't," Delia said. "She didn't know. She didn't know until after he died. Don. She didn't know there were letters."
Anton looked at his coffee for a long time.
"That's worse," he said finally. "Do you understand? That's worse. Because it means she could have known, if she'd looked. It means she let somebody else hold the door for six years and never once asked who was knocking."