"I was eleven."
"You did a very good job on the roundels."
He sat down heavily on the end of the bed and put his face in his hands. After a moment he felt the mattress dip as she sat down beside him. Not touching. Close.
"I'm sorry," he said through his fingers. "I'm so sorry. The wedding thing. The snow. This. You signed up for six hours and a pie and now you're trapped in my childhood bedroom with my mother humming down the hall. You must think I'm the biggest fool in the state of Connecticut."
"Not the biggest," said Delia. "Top ten."
He laughed in spite of himself and took his hands away from his face. She was looking at him in the lamplight, and she had taken out the little gold earrings she had worn all evening and was holding them in her palm, and without them she looked younger, and there was a tiny smudge of brown liner at the outer corner of her left eye that he wanted, absurdly, to fix with his thumb.
"Why'd you say spring?" he asked.
She turned the earrings over in her hand. "Because she asked," she said. "And because she wanted so badly for there to be an answer. Didn't you see her face, Wes? She'd have believed anything. I could have said the moon. I just said the season."
"You didn't have to make the Paris thing so good."