She said, "Quick. How did we meet?"
Wes stared at her. In the car they had covered a great many things. They had covered her middle name, which was Anne, and his allergy to cats, and which of his mother's casseroles to praise and which to survive in silence. They had covered the fact that his father had died two winters ago and that she should not mention it unless his mother did. They had argued, cheerfully, for most of the Merritt Parkway about whether a pie crust should be made with butter or lard. They had not covered this.
His mind went perfectly, luminously blank, the way it did onstage when a string broke in the middle of a solo.
He panicked. "Uh... laundromat?"
Delia looked at him for one long second. The corner of her glossy mouth lifted.
She smirked. "Wow. Romantic."
Then she turned and climbed the steps, and before Wes could suggest that perhaps they ought to discuss it, perhaps a library, perhaps a mutual friend, perhaps literally anything else, the front door swung open and a wedge of warm yellow light spilled out across the snow, and his mother was standing in it.
Barbara Callahan was sixty years old and had never in her life been surprised by anything she had not first arranged to be surprised by. Her silver hair was cut in a neat, chin-length bob that swung when she moved. She wore a cranberry cardigan buttoned over a cream blouse, and her pearls, the good ones, the ones Wes's father had bought her for their twenty-fifth anniversary and that she wore on Thanksgiving and Christmas and to funerals. She had flour on one cuff and a wooden spoon in her hand, and she was smiling the particular smile she reserved for things she intended to get to the bottom of.