"You must be Delia," she said.
"Mrs. Callahan," said Delia warmly, and held out the pie as though she had been rehearsing the gesture for years. "Thank you so much for having me."
"Barbara. Please. Come in, come in, you'll catch your death. Wesley, close your mouth, there's snow going in it."
Wes closed his mouth.
---
The dining room had not changed since 1962. The walls were paneled in dark knotty pine that his father had put up himself one long summer, swearing gently at every board, and the wood glowed honey-brown in the candlelight. Four tall taper candles stood in the brass holders down the center of the table, the flames leaning and straightening every time someone moved. In the fireplace at the end of the room a fire snapped and settled, and the windows on either side of it were feathered with frost, so that the snowy street beyond them was only a blur of blue and amber.
The table had been laid with the wedding china, the one with the thin gold rim and the tiny painted wheat sheaves. There was a dish of cranberry sauce still ridged from the can, because Wes's father had preferred it that way and nobody had had the heart to change it. There was a green bean casserole crowned with fried onions. There were sweet potatoes under a quilt of toasted marshmallows, a basket of the rolls Wes had carried in, a boat of gravy, a lime Jell-O mold with pears suspended in it like small astonished fish. And in the center of everything, on the big ironstone platter, sat the turkey, bronzed and glistening and enormous, more turkey than three people could reasonably be expected to eat if they lived to be a hundred.
Barbara stood at the head of the table with the carving knife and fork. She had insisted on carving herself. She had carved every turkey since Frank died, and she did it with a surgeon's calm.
She laid a slice of white meat on Delia's plate, then a slice of dark, then paused with the knife in midair. The candlelight caught her pearls. She leaned over the turkey with an expression of innocent, bottomless interest.