"You'll have to hold this," she said, and put the pie dish in his lap. It was still faintly warm. "Don't tip it. If you tip it I'll tell your mother about the chiropractor."
The Valiant's heater had two settings, off and inferno, and they drove with it on inferno all the way down I-95 and onto the Merritt Parkway, Delia with her window cracked an inch to let in the cold, Wes with the pie dish wedged between his knees at the red lights until she took it back. They argued about lard. They covered the casseroles and the cats and his father. They talked, almost without meaning to, about other things.
She told him she had gone to Ohio State and studied French because she liked the sound of it and then discovered, too late, that there was nothing to do with French in Toledo except teach it. She told him she had come east two years ago because she wanted to see an ocean that wasn't a lake. She told him she baked because it was the only kind of magic she had ever found that worked the same way every time.
He told her about the van in Vermont and Moose the fiddle player. He told her about Europe, the year of sleeping in hostels and on trains and once, memorably, in a cathedral in Ghent. He told her he had spent most of the spring of 1974 in Paris, playing for coins outside the Métro at Pigalle and in the cafés up the hill where they would let him.
She went quiet at that. She turned her face toward the window and watched the stone bridges of the parkway go by, gray arches heavy with snow.
"Did you ever write anything?" she asked. "Over there?"
"Half a song," Wes said. "About a street in Paris. I never got the last verse. I never got the bridge right either. It's just been sitting there for three years with a hole in the middle."
"Maybe it's waiting for something," Delia said, still looking at the window.
And then the snow got heavier, and the exit came up faster than he expected, and they were turning onto Juniper Lane before either of them remembered that they had not decided how they met.