Delia, who was still sitting at the table with the last of her coffee, met Wes's eyes over the candles. She did not look alarmed. She looked like a woman who had just been dealt an interesting hand of cards.
"Of course," she called after his mother. "Thank you, Barbara."
---
Wes's room was at the top of the stairs on the left, under the slope of the roof, and it had been preserved by his mother with the care of a museum curator and the sentimentality of a mother. There was the twin bed with the plaid spread. There were the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling on fishing line, a Spitfire and a P-51 Mustang caught forever in a slow dogfight. There was the bulletin board with his Little League pennant and a ticket stub from the Newport Folk Festival, 1965, and a photograph of himself at sixteen holding his first guitar, a red Silvertone from the Sears catalog, with an expression of such hopeful seriousness that Wes could not look at it directly. In the closet, behind his old letterman's sweater, the Silvertone itself still leaned in its chipboard case.
His mother made up the bed with fresh sheets that smelled of cedar and cold air. She laid a flannel nightgown printed with tiny blue rosebuds across the pillow. She took a sleeping bag out of the hall closet and dropped it on the braided rug at the foot of the bed with a look at Wes that said she was a modern woman, but there were limits. Then she kissed Delia on the cheek and kissed Wes on the cheek and said, "Sleep well, you two," and went down the hall, and they heard her bedroom door click shut, and then, quite distinctly, they heard her humming.
Delia stood in the middle of the room in her burgundy dress and gold belt and stockinged feet, her boots lined up neatly by the door, and looked around her.
"Oh, Wes," she said, with enormous tenderness. "Is that a Spitfire?"
"Don't," said Wes.
"It's beautiful. You painted the little roundels."