He did not ask Delia to come. He was careful about that, so careful it hurt. He gave notice at the Western Avenue company and found a one-bedroom over a tavern in Bay View, ten minutes from the shop and, as it happened, four blocks from Anton's church, and moved up on Labor Day weekend in the van with his mother's sweaters and his toolbox and a box of Delia's tapes she had made him for the drive. She did not cry until the van turned the corner off Clark Street, and then she cried on the step stool under the curtain rod, and Marty Gold came down without being called and sat in the armchair and said nothing for half an hour, which was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her.
The fall was Interstate 94. It was the Amtrak Hiawatha on Friday nights. It was Sunday-night phone calls after eleven, when the rates dropped, with a calling card whose numbers she memorized like a prayer, and the answering machine on her counter with its tiny cassette full of his voice saying *it's me, call me back, it's late, never mind, don't, go to sleep* — she kept every message, she never taped over one. It was him driving down on Saturdays when Dee could cover for him and falling asleep on her futon at nine o'clock in the evening with his boots still on.
It was not enough, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so until November.
He said it on the phone. He said it gently. "I'm not going to give you a deadline," he said. "I want to say that first. I'm not going anywhere. But I can't do this the way you did the parties. One night a week, so neither of us has to call it anything. I'm thirty-two. I want to call it something."
"I know."
"Do you?"
She was standing in the kitchen with the cord stretched to the window over the sink. The gold party hat was still on the sill, where she had set it at two in the morning on the first of January and never moved it; it had faded a little in the sun, gone from gold to something like brass.
"Yes," she said.
The real cost was not Sam. The real cost was everything that wasn't. It was Nell, two L stops away, and Ronnie, who had become a sister without anyone voting on it. It was the court reporting work she had built over seven years, the judges who asked for her by name. It was the Golds, and Faye's meatballs, and the radiator, and the yellow kitchen Paul had painted without asking. It was a phone number that a woman in Dayton had dialed into the dark six weeks after her son died and found someone on the other end.
She called Evelyn first. Before Sam. Before Nell. On a Sunday night in December after eleven.
"I'm going to give up the apartment," she said. "I think. In January. I'm going to go to Milwaukee. And the number won't — they can't move it, not across state lines. When I go, the number goes."
There was a long silence from Dayton. The refrigerator compressor. The loud clock.
"Delia," Evelyn said. "Listen to me, because I'm old and I've earned the right to say obvious things. It was never the number. I didn't call the number. I called the person who would pick up." A pause. "I spent six years letting a door stay closed because I was afraid of what was on the other side of it. Don't you dare stay in my son's apartment for my sake. Paul would come back and haunt you, and he'd be insufferable about it."
Delia laughed, and it came out wet.
"I'll call wherever you are," Evelyn said. "At eleven. Your eleven. It'll still be my midnight. That part doesn't move."