Dale saw the red hair first.
She was wearing a white alb, belted with a rope, and a green stole over her shoulders embroidered with gold wheat, and her hair was pinned up neat and severe at the back of her head, and she was singing. She had a good alto, not showy. She walked past their pew close enough that he could have reached out and touched her sleeve. She did not look at him. She looked straight ahead at the altar, and her face was calm and grave and entirely at home, and Dale stood there holding the hymnal open to the wrong page with his ears going hot.
"Dad," whispered Birdie, so loudly that the Pelto sisters turned around. "Dad. It's her. She's the minister."
"I see that."
"Did you know?"
"No," said Dale. "I did not know."
He didn't hear much of the service. When she got up in the pulpit to preach he stared at the hymn board and tried to decide if he was angry, and at whom. She hadn't lied to him. He went back over it and she hadn't. I'm with Bethany. He had filled in the rest himself, and he'd filled it in with a casserole, because it had never once crossed his mind that a woman could be standing where Pastor Aho had stood. He knew, vaguely, that the Lutherans had been doing it somewhere for fifteen years, but somewhere wasn't here.
From the looks of the fourth row, it wasn't here for Eino Rautio either.
He caught a piece of the sermon in spite of himself. It was the Gospel about the ten lepers, and she wasn't saying anything he expected. She was talking about the nine who didn't come back. She said she'd always felt sorry for them, the nine, the ones everybody preached against. She said maybe they didn't come back because they were too busy running home to kiss their wives, and maybe God didn't mind that as much as preachers did. She said gratitude wasn't a bill you paid. She said sometimes the most grateful thing you could do with a healed body was to go and live in it.
Birdie wasn't listening at all. She was watching Nora's hands.
Afterward there was coffee in the basement, and Birdie went down to sign up to be a donkey, and Dale meant to go straight out to the truck and wait for her. He got as far as the front steps. Nora was standing at the red door in her alb, shaking hands as people came out, and there was no way past her except through.
"Mr. Haapala," she said, and shook his hand like anybody's.
"Pastor," he said.