"It's eleven o'clock. My mother's down the hall."
"Your mother," said Delia, "is lying in bed with her ear pressed against the wall. Give her something to hear. Is that the Silvertone? In the closet? From the picture?"
So he got up, and found the old guitar in its case behind the letterman's sweater, and sat cross-legged on the sleeping bag in the snowlight and tuned it by ear. The strings were twelve years old and dead as doornails and the action was so high it hurt his fingertips, and none of that mattered. He played her a few old folk songs, softly, and she laughed under her breath in the dark.
"Play the one about the street," she said.
His hands went still on the strings.
"It's not finished."
"I know. Play it anyway."
He played it. He had not played it for anybody in three years. It started in a minor key and climbed, and the first verse was about rain on a hill and a white church at the top of it like a cake left out in the weather, and the second verse was about a boy with empty pockets and a stranger who gave him a coin, and then the song came to the place where the bridge should have been, and there was nothing, only a held chord and a silence, and then it stumbled on into a last verse that was just the first verse again because he had never been able to find anything better to say.
When he was done, the room was very still.