"Up here in January," he said, "your heater hose goes, you've got about twenty minutes before you can't feel your feet. Your fan belt goes, you've got about fifteen before you overheat, and then you're walking. So you carry a spare belt. You carry a gallon of antifreeze. You carry a coffee can with a candle in it and matches and a blanket and a candy bar, and you don't eat the candy bar because you're bored on a Tuesday."
"And if I don't have a spare belt?"
Arvo answered that one from the office doorway, where he'd taken to standing on Saturday mornings with his coffee, pretending he wasn't listening.
"Nylons," he said.
"I'm sorry?"
"Ladies' nylons. Stockings. You take them off, you tie them tight around the pulleys, you drive slow to town. My wife did that, nineteen hundred and fifty-four, on the Seney stretch. She was so mad she didn't talk to me for a week. Not for the nylons. Because I didn't put a spare belt in the car." He nodded, satisfied with the story, and went back to the pumps.
Nora looked at Dale. "Does that actually work?"
"For a few miles, if you're lucky and you tie it tight. It's not a fix. It's a way to limp in."
"Most of what I do is a way to limp in," she said, and he thought she was joking, but she wasn't.
The fourth Saturday was spark plugs and points, and that was the Saturday it started to snow. It came down fine and dry out of a white sky, the first real snow of 1985, and Birdie ran out to the apron in her overalls and stood with her mouth open catching flakes, and Nora stood in the open bay door with a spark plug gapper in one hand and watched her, and Dale watched Nora watching her.
She'd gotten good. Not good like him, but good like someone who'd decided to be. She remembered everything he told her and asked about the things he forgot to say. She'd started bringing a little spiral notebook in her flannel shirt pocket, and he'd caught a look at it once, and it had drawings in it, careful neat drawings of a distributor cap and a water pump with the parts labeled in block capitals, like an anatomy book.
"You draw like a doctor," he said.
"Like a nurse," she said. "I was a nurse first. Before seminary."