Wes had just lifted his glass of cider. It was his mother's cider, hot, mulled with cinnamon sticks and cloves and a strip of orange peel, and it was the only thing on the table he felt confident he could handle.
Delia, beside him, lifted her own glass with perfect calm. She took a small, unhurried sip. She set it down. She dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin.
"Spring."
Wes inhaled his cider.
It went down the wrong way all at once, hot and spiced and merciless, and he folded over the table coughing so violently that the taper candles shivered. Cinnamon burned the back of his nose. His eyes flooded and ran. He groped for his napkin, knocked his fork onto the floor, and coughed into the linen while his mother rose halfway out of her chair and Delia, very kindly, very firmly, patted him between the shoulder blades in a slow and soothing rhythm, the way one might settle a horse. Through the blur of his streaming eyes he could see the turkey, the Jell-O, the frost on the windows, and his mother's face, which was not worried in the least. It was radiant.
When at last he could breathe again, he sat back, red-faced and wet-eyed, and found both women looking at him with identical expressions of patient affection.
"Went down the wrong pipe," his mother said serenely. "He always did that, Delia. Ever since he was little. Anything exciting, and down the wrong pipe it goes."
"I'll keep it in mind," said Delia.
---