Hugh Brennan was sixty-seven. He had started Brennan & Sons in 1962 with one truck, naming it for sons he didn't have yet, which Sam called the most Irish-Catholic act of faith he had ever heard of. There were six electricians now and a bookkeeper named Dee Wojcik who had been there thirty-one years and who ran the place, really, from a desk with a space heater under it. Hugh's knees were gone. He wanted to stop. A company out of Waukesha called Rasmussen had offered to buy him out, a fair price, and would keep the trucks and the contracts and, Sam was fairly sure, keep none of the men over fifty-five, which was four of the six. And Dee.
"Liam doesn't want it," Sam said. Liam was his younger brother, a firefighter in Milwaukee with three kids and no interest in conduit. "Dad never asked me. He just said, at Christmas, that he'd sign whatever Rasmussen put in front of him by September unless somebody gave him a reason not to. And then he looked at the ham."
"And you want to be the reason."
"I don't know what I want." He had his hands on the steering wheel. "That's not true. I want to be the reason. I've wanted to since I was twelve. I left because I wanted to do it somewhere he wasn't watching, and now I've done it somewhere he wasn't watching, for nine years, and I'm good at it, and I'd like to go home and run the thing he built and keep Dee's space heater plugged in." He looked out at the frozen parking lot. "And I've been trying to figure out since October how to say that to you without it sounding like I'm asking you for something."
"You can ask me for something," Delia said.
"No. I can't. Not until you answer the other question." He turned and looked at her. "I'm not trying to be cruel. I'm trying to be fair. I've been coming to your apartment for five years on the one night when nobody would think it meant anything. I don't want to ask you to change your life on the strength of a night that doesn't mean anything."
It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make. A truck went by on the interstate and rocked the van.
She did not answer the question. She leaned across the gearshift and kissed him instead, which was a kind of answer, and a kind of cowardice, and she knew both things while she was doing it. He kissed her back like a man who had also known for a long time and was too tired to pretend otherwise. When she pulled away he laughed, softly, against her hair.
"That's not a sentence," he said.
"I know."
"It's a pretty good paragraph, though."
---
So they were together, that spring, the way people are together who have known each other a long time and skipped the beginning: suddenly and without ceremony, and with a strange shyness about small things, as if the large ones had already been settled. She learned that he slept on his stomach with one arm hanging off the bed like a man reaching for something he'd dropped. He learned that she talked to the radio. Nell said, "Finally," at a volume that carried through the heating ducts, and Annette Gold sent down a second Bundt cake without explanation.
Evelyn, when Delia told her on a Sunday night in April what Anton had said, was quiet for a long time on the line. Then she said, "Thank you for not making it sound better than it was." In May she wrote Anton a letter, care of Theresa, and told Delia she had written it and told her nothing else about it, and Delia did not ask. In October Evelyn mentioned, in passing, between a remark about the parish rummage sale and one about her hip, that she had received a reply. Two pages. "He has very bad handwriting," she said. "Paul always said so." And that was all, and it was enough to make Delia set the phone down on the counter for a moment and stand at the window.
By midsummer, Sam had told his father yes.