"Why did you really do it? Linda. The letters. You're not a liar, Wes. You're a terrible liar. You choked on a glass of cider. Why?"
He lay with his hands folded on his chest and looked at the Spitfire for a long time.
"When my dad died," he said finally, "I came home for a week. For the funeral and all of it. And every night my mother left that porch light on. Every single night. I asked her about it once, and she said she just liked it, it was cheerful. But I'd wake up at two, three in the morning and come downstairs for water, and she'd be sitting in the front room in the dark in her bathrobe, looking out the window at the light. Like she was waiting for somebody to come up the walk." He swallowed. "And I knew it wasn't me she was waiting for. It was him. And he wasn't coming. And I went back to New Haven, and she kept writing me, and every letter it was like I could hear her sitting in that front room. And I thought, if she thinks I'm all right, if she thinks there's someone, maybe she'll stop waiting for me too. Maybe she'll turn the light off and go to bed."
The dark was very quiet.
"That's not lying," Delia said softly. "That's just loving somebody badly."
"Is there a difference?"
"Oh, a big one," she said. "I think so, anyway."
After a moment the bedsprings creaked, and her hand came down over the edge of the mattress, palm open, hanging in the blue air above him. He looked at it. Then he reached up and took it, and her fingers closed around his, warm and strong and slightly floury still at the nails, and they lay like that, one up and one down, holding on across the gap.
"Play me something," she said.