"The first year," she said, "the lights blew, and you fixed them in the dark with a flashlight in your teeth, and then I spent forty minutes crying on the phone with a stranger's mother, and you didn't leave. You didn't ask me who it was. You just stayed and you toasted me across the room at midnight like it was the most normal thing in the world to do for someone. And I thought, I want that. Not a party. That. Someone who stays in the room when the year changes. I kept inviting you because I wanted to find out if you'd keep staying. And you did. Every year. And I was so afraid that if I asked for more than one night, I'd lose the one night." She was crying a little now. She didn't care. "That's why. That's the whole answer. I love you. I've loved you since the fuse. And I'm done with one night a year. I'm coming to Milwaukee. I've already told Hollander. I've already told the phone company. It's costing me things. I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it for us, and I know the difference."
*Two.*
Sam was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on him and would see, she would discover, maybe twice more in her life: once at a courthouse in Milwaukee in the spring of 1998, and once in a delivery room in 2001, where Faye Lindqvist, retired, had driven ninety miles to be the first to hold their daughter.
"Better?" he said, about the hat. His voice did not entirely work.
"Worse," she said. "Much worse."
*One.*
On Clark Street somebody set off firecrackers and a car alarm answered. From the counter, small and far away, Evelyn Pell shouted *Happy New Year* into an apartment full of people. Annette kissed Marty. Gil kissed Anton, who laughed with his eyes closed. And Delia Marsh, in the last hour of her lease, with the lights all the way around, kissed the man who had stayed, and did not step back.
---
Illinois Bell disconnected the number on January 3, 1997, at nine in the morning. Delia was already on the Hiawatha.
On December 31 of that year, in a second-floor apartment in Bay View, Milwaukee, with big windows onto Kinnickinnic Avenue and a curtain rod that Sam had reinforced with toggle bolts, the phone rang at eleven o'clock Central Time.
Delia picked it up on the first ring.
"It's me," Evelyn said. "Is the room full?"
Delia looked. Anton and Gil on the new couch. Dee Wojcik and her husband arguing with Hugh Brennan about the Packers. Nell and Ronnie, off the bus from Chicago with a boombox. Marty and Annette, who had come up on the train and complained about it the entire way and were not going home until Friday. Sam, on the step stool, rehanging a garland that hadn't fallen, just to have something to do with his hands.
"It's full," she said.
"Good," said Evelyn. "Then I'll stay on a while."