"Where?"
She was quiet a moment, setting the gap on the plug. Point oh three five. She checked it twice.
"Long Binh," she said. "The Twenty-fourth Evac. Sixty-nine and seventy."
He knew what that meant. His cousin Ray had gone, and come back, and drank. Dale set down the socket wrench he was holding.
"I didn't know they sent women."
"Nobody knows they sent women. There were about ten thousand of us." She put the plug in the box and took out the next one. "I was twenty-one. I'd been a nurse for eleven months. I thought I was going to help."
"Did you?"
"Some. Not enough." She turned the next plug over in her fingers. "There were nights in the pre-op ward where they'd bring in more boys than we had hands. You'd have to decide who you could fix. The ones you couldn't, you put behind a screen, and you gave them morphine, and you held their hand when you had a minute, and mostly you didn't have a minute." She set the gap. "I counted, after. I don't know why. I had a little book like this one. Not drawings. Just names, and what I couldn't do. I got to two hundred and eleven and I stopped counting."
The snow came down outside. Birdie was making a snowball out of about two inches of slush on the hood of a customer's Pontiac.
"I came home and I couldn't do it anymore," Nora said. "Nursing. I'd stand in a hospital in St. Paul and hear a helicopter go over and my hands would shake. So I did some other things for a while. Most of them stupid. And then I went to seminary, which a lot of people thought was the stupidest of all." She smiled a little, not at him. "I wasn't looking for answers. I knew by then there weren't any. I just thought, if I can't fix anybody, maybe I can at least be the one who stays behind the screen. Who sits there. Somebody ought to."
"And that's why you want to know all this," said Dale slowly. "The car."
"Partly that's Mr. Rautio. Partly." She finally looked at him. "Mostly I just wanted, for once in my life, to learn how to fix a thing that can actually be fixed. Can you understand that?"
He could. He understood it so well he couldn't say anything. He went over to the bench and stood there with his back to her and both hands on the vise, and after a minute he told her. About the clothesline. About Karen sitting down in the grass on a bright Saturday morning with a clothespin in her hand and saying, my head, in that puzzled voice, like somebody had asked her a question she didn't know the answer to. About the drive to Marquette at ninety miles an hour, and how he'd thought the whole way, if I can just get her there, if I can just get her there, as if getting there was the thing, as if it was a car that needed towing. About the doctor's hand on his shoulder. About how he still had the clothespin, he'd found it in the grass a week later, he had it in a coffee can on the dresser and he couldn't throw it away and he couldn't look at it.