And Marty, who stood by the window with his rye and nodded once.
"Mr. Gold," Evelyn said. "Paul wrote about you. You lived upstairs."
"I still live upstairs."
"He said you fixed his bicycle. He said you taught him to play gin and then took eleven dollars off him."
"Fourteen," Marty said. His face didn't move. "He was bad at gin."
"He was," Evelyn agreed. "He was bad at all card games. He couldn't keep a secret in his face." She looked around the room — at the lights on the bookshelves, the radiator, the tinsel on the curtain rod, the silver balloons now tethered properly to the window latch with ribbon so they bobbed against the glass and spelled 1996 to the street — and Delia watched her take it in the way you take in a cold lake, all at once, because there is no other way.
"He said it would be like this," Evelyn said. "He said the lights went all the way around."
Then Ronnie, of all people, said, "Can I get you a drink, Mrs. Pell? There's Coke. There's ginger ale and I think cocktail onions."
"Ginger ale," Evelyn said. "And one onion. Don't tell my doctor."
---
It went better than it should have. Parties often do; that's what they're for. Annette discovered that Evelyn had worked a switchboard one summer in 1939, and the two of them argued delightedly about cord boards. Nell's tape, labeled NYE 95 KEEP OUT, ran from Hootie and the Blowfish to Coolio to, for reasons she refused to explain, "Islands in the Stream." Sam danced with Faye to Dolly and Kenny, badly, and Faye allowed it.
At ten, Evelyn asked to see the kitchen, and Delia took her.
Evelyn stood at the window over the sink for a long time looking at the back porches. Then she opened her small black handbag and took out a cassette tape in a clear plastic case, and set it on the counter between them.
It was a TDK SA90. The insert card had been written on in blue ballpoint, in a narrow upright hand Delia recognized from the side of the NYE box. On the spine it said FOR A. — NYE '91. On the inside of the card was a tracklist, two columns, A side and B side, and at the bottom of the B side, where the last song should be, there was nothing — just a line, and below the line, in the same hand: *(you know which one.)*
"It came back to Dayton with his things," Evelyn said. "Don put the boxes in the basement and I didn't open them until after he passed. I found this in the pocket of Paul's winter coat. He must have been making it in the fall. For the party he didn't — " She stopped. "I've never played it. I bought a little machine to play it, a Walkman, at the Sears, and I took it out of the package and I put it back in. It isn't mine. It was never mine to play."