“Like recognizes like.”
She nods. Then she opens the door.
The party comes in all at once—light across the tile, forty conversations, a kid shrieking, ice in glasses. The bright yellow of the kitchen falls on her back and her hair and the shoulder of a black cardigan.
I get a half-second of the shape of her before I retreat back into the bend of the wall, out of the light.
And in that half-second, a man’s voice comes over the top of everything else.
“Hey—there she is! Dee! Delilah. Babe, your mother’s been hunting you for ten minutes.”
The door swings shut.
The party dwindles back down to a hum.
I stand in the dark with the whiskey bottle by my foot and my cup up on the shelf, waiting for the show to begin.
As I do, I say her name, just to see what it does in my mouth.
“Delilah.”
