Wes set his cup down very carefully in its saucer. It rattled.
He had owned a pair of red swimming trunks in 1974. He had bought them in Nice in March for a dollar and a half. He had told no one about the trunks. There was no reason in the world anyone should know about the trunks.
*She's guessing*, he thought. *She's very good. I told her I was in Paris that spring, and she's guessing, and she's very, very good.*
"And then," said Delia, "the machine ate his last coin. The dryer. He fed it a franc and it didn't start, and he hit it, and it still didn't start, and he turned out his pockets and he had nothing. Not one centime. So I gave him one of mine. And to say thank you, he opened the guitar case and played me a song while his clothes went round and round."
"What song?" said Barbara softly.
Delia was quiet for a moment.
"One he was writing," she said. "About the street. It wasn't finished. It went—" and she hummed, very quietly, five notes, falling and then rising, and then she stopped. "That's all I remember. I told him it needed a bridge. He told me I was a critic. It was the best afternoon I had in Paris."
The fire popped. Barbara Callahan looked at her son across the candles with an expression he could not read at all.
Wes did not hear what anybody said for the next several minutes. Those were his five notes. That was the tune he hummed waiting for the bus, waiting for his coffee, waiting for the band to finish tuning. She had heard him hum them at the bakery, of course. She had told him so yesterday. *Always the same five notes, and you've never once finished the tune.* She had heard him, and she had built a whole story around them, and the red trunks were a lucky guess, and the rue des Martyrs was a lucky guess, because anyone who had studied French would know a street in Paris. That was all. It was a performance, and it was a good one, and he ought to be grateful, and he was. He was grateful. He was so grateful he felt slightly sick.