There it was again: the edge of the thing, like a draft. One night a year. Five New Year's Eves, and a handful of Fourth of Julys on the roof, and her birthday in April when he always brought the same cake from the same Italian bakery on Taylor Street, and the time in 1993 when her car died on Lake Shore Drive and she called him from a pay phone and he came in his work van in a snowstorm and didn't say a word about why she hadn't called Graham.
Graham was a perfectly kind architect who folded his jeans. She had been with him almost three years and had broken it off in March, and the reason she gave him was true, and the reason she didn't give him was standing in her kitchen holding a bowl of ice.
Before Graham, there had been Joanne, Sam's Joanne, the girlfriend in Milwaukee in 1991, who became the fiancée in 1993 and the ex-fiancée in the summer of 1994, for reasons Sam had described only once, on the roof on the Fourth of July that year, with a sparkler going out in his hand: *She said I was always somewhere else. She said it like it was a diagnosis. She wasn't wrong.*
They had never once, in four years, been unattached at the same time. Not until this spring. Not until tonight.
"Sam," she said.
The doorbell buzzed. It was a long, polite buzz, the buzz of someone who had been raised to push a button once and wait.
They looked at each other.
"That'll be the room," Sam said, "getting another person in it."
Evelyn Pell was smaller than her voice. Delia had built her, over four years of phone calls, into a tall, square-shouldered woman, and the woman who came up the stairs was barely five feet, in a camel coat with a fur collar that had been good in 1965, and her handbag was small and patent black and she held it against her stomach with both hands, as if someone might take it.
Her hair was white and set. Her eyes were Paul's; Delia knew this from the envelope of photographs in the NYE box, which she had finally opened in 1993 and then closed again and put back. Paul at the head of this same table, in a paper crown, with his arm around a dark-haired man who was laughing so hard his eyes had closed.
"Delia," Evelyn said, at the top of the stairs.
"Evelyn."
They did not know how to do it, the first touch. They had talked for perhaps six hours across four years, in the dark, at the turning of the year, about grief and Don's lungs and whether there was a God, and they had never seen each other's faces, and there was a moment on the landing in which both of them were shy as children. Then Evelyn put out one gloved hand, formally, and Delia took it and held it, and Evelyn said, "Oh, for heaven's sake," and pulled her into a hug that smelled of Shalimar and airplane.
Behind her in the doorway the whole party had arranged itself not to be looking.
Delia made the introductions. Nell and Ronnie, who stood up. Faye, who didn't, but raised her glass. Annette, who said, "We've heard so much about you," and meant it warmly, and then realized how it sounded, and pressed her lips together. Sam, who took Evelyn's coat and hung it in the hall closet on the hook where the NYE box had been.