They liked plain food, plainly prepared-roast beef and broiled chicken and burgers. Noah hated vegetables but was required to eat one spoonful each night. Mr. Miller was probably no fonder of them, but he worked his way conscientiously through everything, and he always told her, “Dinner is delicious, Delia.” She suspected he would have said that no matter what she served. He asked her several courteous questions at every meal (had her day gone well? was she finding what she needed?), but she sensed he didn’t listen to her answers. This was a sad, sad man underneath, and sometimes even when his own son spoke there was a moment of silence before he pulled himself together to reply.

“Guess what!” Noah might say. “Kenny Moss just got a humongous golden retriever. Dad, can we get a golden retriever?”.

Long pause. Clinking of china. Then finally: “There is no such word as ‘humongous.’”

“Sure there is, or how come I just used it?”

And the two of them would be off on one of their arguments. Delia had never known anyone as particular about words as Joel Miller. He despised all terms that were trendy (including “trendy” itself). He refused to agree that something was “neat” unless it was, literally, tidy. He interrupted one of Noah’s most animated stories with the observation that no one could be “into” mountain climbing. But he always spoke with good humor, which probably explained why Noah still ventured to open his mouth.

Fastened to Delia’s bathroom door was a full-length mirror, the first she had faced in six months, outside of a changing booth; and she was startled to see how thin she had grown. Her hipbones were sharp little chips, and the tops of her dresses looked hollow. So she served herself large helpings at these suppers, and she breakfasted with Noah every morning, and she walked to Rick-Rack’s each noon to dine on something hefty-even crab cakes, for she was making good money now and had nothing else to spend it on.

Rick also served pork barbecue, the vinegary kind she was partial to, as it turned out. “You know,” she told him, “I never had much of a chance to try a real meal here. I knew you were a good cook, but I didn’t know how good.”

“And here you been taking your Sunday dinners at that la-di-da Bay Arms!” he said.

Was there anything about her this whole town didn’t know?

After lunch, she crossed the street to pay a visit to George. He was in a snit with her for leaving. He showed up as soon as she let herself in but then turned his back pointedly and stalked off. “George?” she wheedled. No response. He marched into Belle’s living room and vanished. Delia waited in the hall, and a moment later a telltale sprig of whiskers poked around the edge of the door. A nose, an ear, an accusing green eye. “Georgie-boy!” she said. He sidled out, dusting the door with his fur and seeming to hang back even as he drew close enough to let her pat him.

Why couldn’t Delia’s children miss her this much?

All around town the streets were festooned with bristly silver ropes and honeycombed red tissue bells. There was a wreath above Mrs. Lincoln’s desk in the library. Vanessa had tied a red bow to Greggie’s stroller.

The thought of spending Christmas with the Millers-poor Noah bearing the full weight of it-filled Delia with dread. But maybe they didn’t celebrate Christmas. Maybe they were Jewish, or some kind of fundamentalists who frowned on pagan ritual. It was true that so far, with just a week remaining, they hadn’t given a sign they knew what season this was.

Delia went out to the garage to talk to Mr. Miller. “Um, Joel?” she said.

He was measuring a board at his workbench, wearing a raveled black sweater and frayed corduroys. Delia waited for him to look up-it took a minute-and then she said, “I wanted to ask about Christmas.”

“Christmas,” he said. He reeled in his measuring tape.

“Do you observe it?”

“Well, yes. Normally,” he said.

By “normally,” he must mean when he still had his wife. This would be their first Christmas without her, after all. Delia watched the thought travel across his face, deepening the lines at either side of his mouth. But he said, “Let’s see. Ah, you would get the day off, of course. Noah will be at his mother’s, and some friends in Wilmington have been asking me to visit. School is closed through New Year’s, so if you need more time in Baltimore -”

“I won’t be going to Baltimore.”

He stopped speaking.

“I just wondered how you celebrate,” she told him. “Do you put up a tree? Should I take Noah shopping for gifts?”

“Gifts.”

“Something for his mother, maybe?”

“Oh, God,” he said, and he sank onto the high stool behind him. He clamped the top of his head with one large hand-his usual sign of distress. “Yes, certainly for his mother, and also for Nat, Ellie’s father. He and Noah are pretty close. And for me, I guess; aren’t we supposed to encourage that? And I should get something for him. Oh, God Almighty.”

“I’ll take him tomorrow,” she said. She hadn’t intended to plunge the man into despair.

“That’s a Saturday. Your weekend.”

“I don’t mind.”

Seated on the stool, Mr. Miller was closer to Delia’s eye level. He looked across at her for a moment. He said, “Don’t you have any family around? For weekend visits and such?”

“No.”

It was a mark of his isolation, she thought, that he had apparently not heard so much as a whisper about her past. For all he knew, Delia had dropped from the sky. Clearly he would have liked to ask more, but in the end he just said, “Well, thanks, Delia. As far as a tree goes, I figure since Noah won’t be here for the day itself, we don’t need to bother.”

Delia would have bothered anyhow, if it had been up to her. But she didn’t argue. When she left, Mr. Miller was still slumped on his stool, staring down at the measuring tape in his hands.

She and Noah did all his Christmas shopping at the hardware store-dark, old-fashioned, wooden-floored Brent Hardware, across the street from Belle’s. Noah had very definite ideas, Delia discovered. For his mother he chose a screwdriver with interchangeable shafts, because she lived alone now and would need to make her own repairs. For his grandfather, who had trouble bending, a tonglike instrument called a “grabber” that would help him retrieve dropped objects. And for his father, a device to hold a nail in position while he was hammering it in. “Dad is all the time banging his thumb,” Noah told Delia. “He’s not a real great carpenter.”

“What is it that he builds, exactly?” Delia asked.

“Shadow boxes.”

“Shadow boxes?”

For an instant she pictured Charlie Chaplin shadowboxing in baggy trunks.

“Those, like, partitioned-up wooden shelves. You know? To hang on a wall?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Because my mom collects miniatures. Teeny little kitchen utensils and furniture and like that, and he used to make these shadow boxes for her to keep them in.”

And now? Delia wanted to ask.

As if he had read her mind, Noah said, “Now he just piles them behind the tires in the garage.”

“I see.”

She couldn’t tell from Noah’s tone how he felt about his parents’ separation. He had mentioned his mother only in passing, and this coming visit would be his first since Delia’s arrival.

“I want to pick out one more thing,” he told her. “You go wait outside a minute.”

So he was buying her a present too. She wished he wouldn’t. She would have to act appreciative; she would have to make a big show of putting whatever it was to use, not to mention the necessity of buying something for him that was neither more nor less serious than what he’d bought her. Oh, how had she worked her way back to this? She should have stayed at Belle’s; she’d known it all along.

But Noah was so gleeful as he hustled her out the door, she couldn’t help smiling.

“Will you need money?” she asked him.