"I fix things," he said. "That's what I'm for. It's the only thing I've ever been good at. And I couldn't do anything."
Nora didn't tell him it wasn't his fault. She didn't tell him anything. She came over and stood next to him at the bench, close but not touching, and they both looked out the bay door at his daughter in the snow.
"Two hundred and eleven," Nora said at last. "And one."
"And one," said Dale.
That was all. It was enough. It was two people at a workbench who had each been on the wrong side of a screen and knew it.
* * *
She started coming to supper on Wednesdays after that. It was Birdie's doing again, all of it, and Dale stopped pretending otherwise.
Birdie set the table for three with the good plates, the ones with the blue rim that had been a wedding present, and folded the paper napkins into triangles, and put a candle in the middle in a jelly jar. The first Wednesday Dale made pasties, the only thing he could cook that anybody would call cooking. The second Wednesday Nora brought a Minnesota hotdish with tater tots on top, and Birdie looked at it with deep suspicion and then ate three helpings.
Afterward Nora helped with the dishes. She washed and Dale dried and Birdie put away, standing on the step stool, and the radio was on low, and Dale caught himself once standing there with the dishtowel and a plate in his hands, not drying it, just listening to the two of them argue about whether Bon Jovi was better than Madonna. Birdie was strongly for Madonna, on cassette, at volume.
It was the third Wednesday, after the dishes, when Birdie asked.
Nora was braiding her hair again at the kitchen table, two braids for school the next day, and Birdie was sitting on a chair turned backwards with her chin on her arms, and Dale was in the living room pretending to read the Mining Journal. He could see them through the doorway.
"Nora," Birdie said, "can pastors be moms?"
Dale stopped pretending to read.