She looked at him standing there in her living room in the wreckage of a year, tinsel still clinging to one shoulder, the balloons at his feet spelling a number that wouldn't be true for five more hours. She knew the answer. She had known it for a long time. She gave him a small smile that she hoped said *I know, and you know I know*, and she turned away and picked up the receiver, because it was seven o'clock and nobody she was expecting would call at seven o'clock, and that alone made her heart do something unpleasant.
"Hello?"
"Delia? It's Evelyn. Evelyn Pell." A pause, a breath, the faint hiss of a line that was not long-distance. "I know it's early, dear. I'm sorry. I'm not calling from home."
For four years Evelyn Pell had called at exactly eleven o'clock Central Time on New Year's Eve, which was midnight in Dayton, Ohio, and she had always called from home, from the kitchen phone beside the calendar from her parish, and Delia knew this because she could hear the kitchen: the refrigerator compressor, a clock with a loud second hand, once a kettle, once a dog barking next door. Evelyn's voice on those calls had a particular resonance, the sound of a woman alone in a room she had furnished for more people.
This was a different sound. Traffic, close. A door opening and closing on a pneumatic hinge. Somebody laughing in the background with a bellhop's professional laugh.
"Where are you?" Delia said.
"I'm at a hotel on Michigan Avenue that my husband would have called a waste of money." A small dry sound that might have been a laugh. "I flew into O'Hare this afternoon. I took a taxi. I'm here."
Delia put her free hand flat against the wall. Behind her she was aware of Sam going still, of him lifting a balloon off his shoulder and holding it with exaggerated care, as if noise might break something.
"You're in Chicago."
"I'm in Chicago." Another breath. "I should have written first. I started a letter in November and I couldn't finish it, so I bought the ticket instead, which is the wrong order of operations, I know. I'm seventy-four. I'm allowed to do some things in the wrong order."
"Evelyn, are you all right?"
"I'm perfectly well. That's not why." The line hummed. "Delia, I wanted to ask you two things, and you can say no to both. The first is whether I could come to your party tonight. Not to stay. Just to see the room with people in it. I've never seen it. Paul used to describe it to me on the phone every year, and I used to say, Paul, I'm sure it's lovely, the way you say it about a picture of a grandchild you haven't met, and I never once came. Not once in nine years."
Delia closed her eyes.
"And the second thing," Evelyn said, "is harder, and I'd like to ask it in person. If that's all right."
"Yes," Delia said. "Yes. Come. Come whenever you want. Come now."
"Not now. You'll have things to do. I'll come at nine. I have the address. I have always had the address." The faintest catch, and then the steel came back into her voice, the voice of a woman who had taught seventh-grade English for thirty-one years. "Thank you, dear. Go put the chips out."