"You think God needed her? More than Birdie did?"
"No," said Nora Brennan. "I don't think that at all. I think Pastor Aho was a kind old man who didn't know what to say, so he said the worst thing he'd ever heard anybody else say. And I think you were right to walk out. I'd have walked out with you, if I'd been there." She took a breath. "I don't know why your wife died, Dale. Nobody does. I'm not going to stand up there and pretend I do. If that's what you were afraid of."
He hadn't expected that. He didn't know what he'd expected. Behind them Eino Rautio came down the steps with his wife and got into his Oldsmobile and sat in it a minute, looking at the two of them standing by the wrecker, before he drove off.
"That one," said Dale.
"That one," Nora agreed. "Mr. Rautio is the reason I'm on a one-year interim call instead of a regular one. The council vote was four to three. He's let me know he'll be counting the snowstorms I get stuck in. He's told me, very kindly, that the last pastor here who couldn't handle the roads was a man from Ohio in 1962 who had to be dug out of a snowbank on the Wetmore road by the county plow and left by Easter." She pulled her coat tighter. "So when your daughter told me you could fix anything, and that you'd taught her, I thought, well. There's a man who knows how to teach a person something. Perhaps he'll teach me."
The church door opened and Birdie came barreling down the steps with a piece of coffee cake in each hand and her ponytail flying.
"I'm a donkey," she announced. "And a little bit of an angel at the end. Mrs. Maki says the donkey can take off its ears for the last song." She stopped, out of breath, looking from one of them to the other, and something went across her face, some small alarm, quick as a bird crossing a window. "Are you still coming Saturday? You're still coming. Right?"
Nora looked at Dale.
It would have been easy to say it was different now. He could have found a dozen reasons. Busy season, the snow coming, she could take her car to the Ford garage in Marquette like the Lutheran pastors before her had probably done. He looked at his daughter's face.
"Seven o'clock," he said. "We open at seven. Bring more of that pulla, Arvo's been asking."
* * *
So she kept coming, and the Saturdays piled up the way the snow would soon, one on top of another until you couldn't remember the ground.
The second Saturday was oil. She drained the Volaré herself into a pan and got it all over her wrist, and she laughed and held the wrist up and looked at it as if it were something interesting a parishioner had brought her. The third Saturday was belts and hoses. He showed her how a fan belt ought to give about half an inch when you pressed it, and what one looked like glazed and cracked and about to go, and how to change one with a three-eighths socket and a little patience.