The kitchen was narrow, a galley with a window over the sink that looked onto the back porches and the alley and a sky that had gone from gray to orange with city light. Sam took the ice tray from her and ran it under the tap.
"You okay?" he said.
"I don't know what she wants."
"Yes, you do."
She looked at him. He was cracking the ice into a bowl, one cube at a time, with great attention.
"She wants to find Anton," Delia said.
Anton was the friend. *His friend took care of everything,* Hollander had said, and it had taken Delia most of 1992 to understand that the friend was not a friend. Evelyn had told her eventually, on the third call, the 1993 call, in the flat voice of a person reading her own confession off a card. Anton Ferrante had lived with Paul in this apartment for six years. He had nursed him through two winters. When Paul died at Illinois Masonic in November 1991, it was Anton who called Dayton, and it was Don Pell who answered the phone and who, the next week, flew to Chicago, claimed the body, arranged a closed-casket funeral at St. Albert the Great in Kettering, and informed Anton through a lawyer that he would not be welcome there.
Evelyn had not stopped him. That was the sentence she had read off the card. *I did not stop him.* Don had been dead since the spring of 1994. She had been alone in the house in Dayton for almost two years with the sentence.
"She wants to find Anton," Delia said again, "and she wants me to help."
Sam put the bowl of ice down. "And you're going to."
"How would I even — I don't know where he is. Marty might. Marty knew him." She heard her own voice speeding up. "Is it my business? It's not my business. It's not my apartment, really, it's not my number, it's not my dead friend, I just answered a phone."
"For four years."
"For four years," she admitted.
He leaned against the counter. Behind him the window had fogged; someone had drawn a smiley face in the condensation at some point and it had dried into a ghost. "Can I say something?"
"You never say anything. Say something."
"You've been helping her since the first time she called. You just did it one night a year so you wouldn't have to think of it as helping." He shrugged, a little helplessly. "That's not a criticism. I know about doing things one night a year."