Wes found them in the kitchen.
The kitchen was harvest gold, all of it: the refrigerator, the range, the wall phone with its long coiled cord, the canisters marked FLOUR SUGAR COFFEE TEA in brown script. There was a macramé owl on the wall by the window that his mother had made herself during a phase in 1973 that nobody discussed. There was bacon popping in the cast-iron skillet and a pan of turkey hash browning beside it and cinnamon toast under the broiler, and there was coffee, and there was snowlight pouring in through the window over the sink, and at the little round table in the breakfast nook there was Delia, wearing her burgundy dress again and his mother's pink terry-cloth bathrobe over it, with her hair wound up on hot rollers.
They were his mother's hot rollers, the Clairol set in the beige case that had sat on the bathroom counter for as long as Wes could remember, and his mother was standing behind Delia's chair taking them out one at a time with the concentration of a bomb technician.
"Good morning," said Delia brightly.
"Good morning, sweetheart. Sit. Eat. Don't talk to us, we're at a critical stage."
Wes sat. He ate bacon. He watched his mother lift out the last roller and set it in the case, and run her fingers through Delia's hair, and then take a big round brush and work it back from her face in long, sure strokes, tossing and lifting, until the honey-blonde layers fell into place again in those wide feathered wings, full and soft and enormous, bouncing as if they had their own opinion about gravity.
"There," said Barbara, stepping back. "Better than the beauty parlor."
"Barbara, you're a genius," said Delia, and took a little compact out of the pocket of the pink bathrobe, and in the mirror and the snowlight she did her face right there at the breakfast table while Wes forgot to chew. A pencil along her brows, following and sharpening their high clean arch. The brown liner smudged along her lash lines with the tip of her little finger until her eyes went smoky and deep. A sweep of peachy blush along each cheekbone, out toward her temples. Gloss on her lips from a tiny pot, pink-nude and shining. She snapped the compact closed and looked up and caught him staring, and raised one of those arched brows a quarter of an inch.
"Your bacon," she said, "is on your sweater."