"You want to be a shepherd," Dale said.
"I want to be an angel. But I'd be a shepherd. I'd be a sheep, even. I'd be a donkey."
"There's no donkey in the Christmas story."
"There's always a donkey. How do you think Mary got there?"
He thought about the last time he'd been inside Bethany Lutheran Church. It had been a Tuesday in April of 1983, and it had been raining, and the church had smelled of wet wool and lilies, so many lilies that for a year afterward he couldn't walk past the florist on Elm. Karen had been thirty-one years old. She had been hanging sheets on the line in the backyard on a bright cold Saturday morning, and she had said, "Dale, my head," in a puzzled voice, and sat down in the grass with a clothespin still in her hand, and by Sunday night she was gone. A bleed in the brain. The doctor in Marquette had used the word aneurysm and then a lot of other words, and the only one Dale remembered was the one he'd said at the end, very gently, with his hand on Dale's shoulder. Nothing. There was nothing anybody could have done.
Dale Haapala had spent his whole life being the man people called when something broke. There was nothing anybody could have done. He had not known, until that night, that there were sentences you could not get out from under.
And then at the funeral old Pastor Aho, who had baptized him and confirmed him and married him, who meant well, who had meant well his entire life, had stood in the pulpit over Karen's casket and said that God must have needed another angel, and that Karen was in a better place, and that it was all part of a plan. Dale had stood up in the second pew in the middle of it. He hadn't said a word. He'd just stood up, and walked down the side aisle with his hands in fists, and gone out the side door into the rain, and sat in the wrecker in the parking lot until it was over. Afterward his mother-in-law brought Birdie out to him, five and a half years old, and she climbed into the cab without a word and put her head on his arm.
He had not been back since. He did the Methodists' furnace and the Catholics' boiler and the Bethany snowblower when they called, which was often, and he did it for nothing, but he had not set foot past the narthex.
"Dad?" said Birdie.
"We'll go," he said. "This once. We'll see."
Sunday was bright and cold, and he wore his good corduroy jacket and the tie Karen had bought him for her cousin's wedding, and he brushed Birdie's hair and couldn't braid it, not after last Saturday, not after seeing how it was supposed to look, so he just put it in a ponytail with her blue barrette and let her wear her Sunday dress with the white tights under her snow pants. They were late, on purpose. He wanted to slip in the back.
Bethany was a white frame church with a square bell tower and a red door, built in 1904 by Finnish miners. Inside it smelled the way it had always smelled, of furniture polish and old hymnals and the radiators ticking. The pews were about half full. Kelly Maki turned all the way around in her pew and waved at Birdie like she was flagging down a plane. He saw Eino Rautio, chairman of the church council since roughly the Truman administration, sitting on the aisle in the fourth row with his arms folded across his chest and his jaw set like a man waiting out a toothache.
He and Birdie slid into the last pew as the organ finished the prelude. Everyone stood. The processional hymn began, and the crucifer came down the center aisle with the brass cross, a Maki boy in a white robe two sizes too big, and behind him came the pastor.