"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. It's a belt that's going. You know it's going, you can hear it squealing every time you start up. So you change it. You don't wait till it snaps on the Seney stretch at two in the morning." He was angrier than he meant to be. He could hear it in his voice and couldn't get it out. "You sat at my kitchen table and told my daughter she could need people. You told her it was all right. You let her—" He stopped.
"I know," Nora said.
"She's eight years old. She's already had one person walk out of that house and not come back. She didn't get a vote on that one either."
Nora flinched as if he'd hit her. He saw it, and he was sorry the instant he saw it, and he didn't take it back. He didn't know how to. They stood there in the cold shop with six feet of concrete between them, and the space heater ticked, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
"I'll pray about it," she said finally.
"You do that," said Dale.
She left. He heard the Volaré start out in the lot, heard it idle, heard her sit there a long minute before she pulled out. He thought she was probably sitting with her hands on the wheel, the way she had on M-28 that first night, bracing or praying or both. He didn't go out.
He went home. Birdie was at the kitchen table in her nightgown with the hand mirror from the bathroom propped against the sugar bowl, trying to braid her own hair. Mrs. Pelto from next door, who stayed with her evenings when Dale worked late, had already gone home. The braid was a disaster. It was lumpy and crooked and half of it had already come out, and Birdie was gripping the end of it so hard her knuckles were white, and her face was red and wet.
"Nora was going to show me," she said. "She said Wednesday. And now she isn't coming Wednesday. Kelly Maki said her mom said Nora's going to get fired because of you. Because you kissed her. Is that true?"
He sat down across from her. He didn't lie to her. He'd never lied to her, not even when she was five and asked him where her mother was, and he'd said, she died, Bird, she's not coming back, and held her while she screamed.
"Some people are upset that we kissed," he said. "Yes. And she might be going to a different job. In Minneapolis. She hasn't decided."
Birdie stared at him. Then she let go of the braid, and it came apart all at once, and she put her face down on her arms on the kitchen table and cried the way she hadn't cried in two years, not since the first Christmas, hard and silent with her whole back shaking.