It was nearly three o'clock when the Valiant came down off the Wilbur Cross Parkway into New Haven, its heater roaring on inferno and its wipers smearing salt across the windshield, and the old red Silvertone lying across the back seat in its chipboard case like a passenger who had been asked along at the last minute and was trying not to get in the way.
He had written the bridge in Milford.
He had not meant to. He had been sitting at a red light behind a sanding truck with Delia's letter open on the passenger seat, and the light had stayed red for a very long time, and he had found himself humming the five notes, and then a sixth, and then a seventh that went up instead of down, and something in his chest had turned over like an engine catching on a cold morning. He had sung it at the next light and the light after that, and he had written the words on the back of a Mobil receipt at a gas station in Orange with a pen that only worked if you breathed on it. They were not very good words. He did not care. They were the right ones.
Moretti's was open, steamy and crowded with people buying bread to go with their leftovers. Old Mrs. Moretti was at the register with her crossword. When she saw Wes come through the door in his leather jacket and his mother's red scarf, she put down her pen, took off her reading glasses, and looked at him for a long time over the top of the cannoli case.
"She called in," said Mrs. Moretti. "Two hours ago. From a pay phone at the train station in Stamford. She was crying, you stupid boy."
"I know," said Wes. "Where is she?"
Mrs. Moretti considered him. She seemed to be weighing something, the way she weighed flour, without a scale, by long experience.
"It's Friday," she said finally. "On Fridays, she does her wash. The Suds-O-Matic on Grand Avenue, by the hardware store. She's been doing it since April." She put her glasses back on and picked up her pen. "Seven months that girl comes in Saturday mornings an hour early so she can be at the front counter at eight-fifteen. Seven months she puts two crullers in your bag. You think that's an accident? You think crullers fall from heaven? Go."
He went.