He closed his eyes and smiled into the receiver, forehead against the kitchen wall where childhood growth marks still lived under fresh paint. Outside, Vermont held its snow like a secret it was willing to share with anyone who asked politely. Inside two houses, separated by miles of white hills and the memory of a wood-paneled compartment, two people who had shared a clerical error and a delay and a kiss began the longer, quieter work of choosing each other in daylight—without a train to blame, without a weather announcement to thank, with only the ordinary miracle of calling back, of hearing a voice without frosted glass between them.
"I told Meg," Claire said. "About Grant. She said love should fit better than a sample size. Then she fed me soup and threatened to drive to New York and have words with my mother about Royal Doulton figurines as a substitute for listening. She's fierce. You'd like her. She already likes you, which is unfair because she's only met you through my face when I said your name."
"I told my mother about Chicago," Samuel said. "She cried once, briefly, into the dish towel. Then she touched the walnut table—we set it up this afternoon, in the dining room where the empty chair lives—and said Dad would have argued for the money and then secretly been proud of the refusal. She says the table is honest. She sat down and cried again, differently. Better."
They talked until the long-distance charges became a joke and then a promise to hang up and then a failure to hang up. Claire described the parlor with the candles (extinguisher at the ready). Samuel described Bevel's absence and his plan to bring the cat a Vermont postcard it would ignore. When they finally said goodnight, it was not an ending. It was a bookmark.
Before the diner, before the second meeting on the porch, there was the afternoon of Christmas Eve in two separate houses, and the way both of them kept touching their pockets where the punched tickets lived. Claire helped Meg hang the real candles on the tree with the extinguisher companionably near, and every time a match flared she thought of the compartment bulb and the way Samuel's face had looked half in shadow. She set the table with Meg's good china and left, without announcing it, an empty place near the end—not for Grant, who was in the city with his alphabetized life, but for the idea of arrival, for the possibility that the year might still bring someone who fit. Meg noticed and said nothing with her mouth and everything with a refill of Claire's wine.