Something flickered across her face again, that same quick bird. "I didn't make it good," she said. "It just was."
She stood up before he could answer, gathered the rosebud nightgown off the pillow, and went down the hall to the bathroom. He heard the water running for a long time. He unrolled the sleeping bag on the braided rug, and lay down on top of it in his sweater and corduroys, and looked up at the Spitfire and the Mustang turning slowly in the warm air from the register, and felt his heart going in his chest like a kick drum at the end of a long set.
She came back in the rosebud nightgown, which reached only to the middle of her shins and was buttoned primly to the throat, with her face scrubbed clean and pink and her honey-blonde hair brushed out loose and enormous around her shoulders, still holding its feathered shape out of pure stubbornness. Wes, from the floor, made a small involuntary sound and turned it into a cough.
"Wrong pipe?" said Delia.
"Something like that."
She climbed into the twin bed and switched off the lamp. The room went blue. Snowlight came in through the window under the eaves, pale and shadowless, and lay across the ceiling and the slow-turning airplanes, and through the glass he could see the flakes still falling past the streetlight at the end of the lane.
For a while neither of them said anything. The house ticked and settled around them. The furnace came on in the basement with a soft whump and the register breathed warm air across the floor.
"Can I ask you something?" Delia said into the dark.
"You're in my bed wearing my mother's nightgown. You can ask me anything."