"Hal," said Wes stupidly.
"Hal," said Delia. "He's very nice. He likes the Yankees."
She went back up the steps and into the house, and he stood in the snow in his sweater with the laundry ticket in his hand and did not follow her, because he did not know what to say, and because every single thing he could think of to say was wrong.
Twenty minutes later Hal Szabo's brown Oldsmobile Cutlass came crunching out of the driveway next door, chains on its tires, and pulled up at the foot of the freshly snowblown walk. Delia came out of the house with her cream coat buttoned to the throat and her empty pie dish under her arm. She did not look at Wes, who was standing beside the buried Valiant with a shovel in his hands, having moved approximately four inches of snow in twenty minutes. She got into the Oldsmobile. Hal, a broad, kindly, bald man in a plaid hunting cap, lifted two fingers off the wheel at Wes with an expression of profound male sympathy, and the Cutlass crunched away down Juniper Lane, and turned the corner by the Petersons', and was gone.
Wes went back inside. His mother was sitting at the little table in the breakfast nook. In front of her, in the middle of the tablecloth, on a folded paper napkin, sat the green velvet box, and beside it a note in round, slanted handwriting, written on the back of one of his mother's recipe cards.
*Barbara—Thank you for the best Thanksgiving I've had in years. I'm sorry. I can't take this. It should belong to someone who isn't pretending. Use butter. —D.*
Wes sat down across from his mother. He put the pink laundry ticket on the tablecloth next to the ring. He looked at the two of them for a while, the velvet and the paper, side by side.
"Ma," he said. "There's no Linda."
"I know, sweetheart."