"The chips are out."
"Then eat fewer of them," Evelyn said, and hung up.
Delia stood with the receiver in her hand until it started to make the off-hook noise, that rising electronic whoop that the phone company invented to shame people. She hung it up. When she turned around Sam had gathered all four of the big balloons into his arms, and the garland was coiled over his forearm like rope, and he was waiting.
"That was Evelyn," he said. Not a question.
"She's here. She's in Chicago. She's coming at nine."
He let out a breath. He knew who Evelyn was; he had been here the first time she called. He had been here every time.
---
The first time had been December 31, 1991. Delia had moved in on the eighteenth of that month with eleven boxes, a futon, and her grandfather's step stool, into a one-bedroom on the second floor of a yellow-brick three-flat in Andersonville that she could not quite afford. The previous tenant had died in November. The landlord, a brisk, distracted man named Hollander who owned four buildings and visited none of them, had mentioned it on the phone the way he might mention that the oven ran hot. "Previous tenant passed. Place is cleaned out. His friend took care of everything."
The phone line was still connected. To save the deposit, Delia had called Illinois Bell and assumed the account instead of opening a new one, which meant she kept the number, which meant that six weeks after Paul Pell died of AIDS at thirty-four, his number still rang in his apartment, and the woman who answered it was a twenty-six-year-old court reporter who did not know his name.
The outlets in the front room had died on her the first week. Hollander sent an electrician, and the electrician could only come on the thirty-first, and so at three o'clock on New Year's Eve a tall young man with a toolbox and a middle part had knelt behind her radiator and told her the wiring in the building had been installed by someone who hated the future.
His name was Sam. He was twenty-seven, he worked for a company on Western Avenue, and he was covering for a guy whose baby was coming. He fixed the outlets in two hours and talked to her while he did it, not much, but enough. When he was packing up she had asked what he was doing that night, and he had said, honestly, nothing; his girlfriend was in Milwaukee with her family and he had begged off to take the overtime. And Delia, who had a sister coming over and a bottle of cheap champagne and nothing else in the world, heard herself say: "Stay. If you want. It's not a party. It's two people and a futon."
He stayed. Her sister Nell came at eight with a boombox and a shoebox of tapes. At ten-thirty Delia found a cardboard box at the back of the hall closet that she had somehow not noticed when she moved in. Someone had written on the side in black marker, NYE — DO NOT TOSS. Inside were tangled strands of white lights, a roll of silver tinsel garland, a bag of gold paper stars, and an envelope of photographs she did not open. She and Nell and Sam had looked at each other over it like children who had found a door in the back of a wardrobe.
They hung the lights. The lights blew the fuse. Sam fixed the fuse in the dark with a flashlight held in his teeth. When the lights came back on, the phone rang.
It was eleven o'clock. On the television, Dick Clark was counting down in Times Square, because in Chicago the ball always dropped an hour early. Delia picked up and a woman's voice said, "Paul?" And then, before Delia could answer, the voice said, "No. I'm sorry. I know. I know he's not. I just dialed it. I don't know why I dialed it. He always called me at midnight. My midnight. He said nobody should be alone when the year turns, and then he'd go back to his party." And then the woman had begun to cry, very quietly, the way people cry when they have been practicing not to.
Delia could have said *wrong number* and hung up. She didn't. She slid down the wall with the cord stretched across the kitchen doorway and said, "Tell me about him," and Evelyn Pell of Dayton, Ohio, told her, for forty minutes, while Nell turned the television down and Sam sat on the step stool with his toolbox at his feet and did not leave.
At the actual midnight, Chicago midnight, Delia was still on the phone, and she heard her sister and the electrician count down from ten in whispers so as not to disturb her, and she heard them say *happy new year* to each other, softly, and she watched Sam lift his paper cup of champagne in her direction across the room, a toast to someone he didn't know, and something inside her came quietly unlatched.