"I knew it," she said into her arms. "I knew it. You can't just get one."
Dale picked her up. She was too big to pick up, really, all elbows and knees, but he did it anyway, and carried her into the living room and sat in the recliner with her on his lap the way he'd sat with her after the funeral, and held her, and looked at the blank gray screen of the television until she fell asleep.
Later, after he'd put her to bed, he went upstairs to his own room and took down the coffee can from the top of the dresser and opened it. The clothespin was in there. Just a plain wooden clothespin, gone gray now, with the spring a little rusted.
He held it for a long time.
He thought about two hundred and eleven names in a little book, and a woman who'd been twenty-one years old, sitting behind a screen in the dark holding a boy's hand because she couldn't do anything else, and then getting up, and going to the next one, and the next. He thought about what it would do to a person, to do that two hundred and eleven times. He thought about how a person like that might come to believe that the only safe way to love anybody was on your way out the door.
He thought: she told me. She stood in my shop and told me the truth about herself, the worst truth she had, and I threw a wrench at her.
He put the clothespin back in the can. He did not throw it away. But he put the can in the drawer this time, instead of on top of the dresser where he'd have to look at it, and that was something.
* * *
He didn't go to the council meeting. It wasn't his church, he told himself, not anymore, and it wasn't his business, and anyway nobody had asked him. Arvo reported afterward, by way of Mrs. Lindberg, that it had gone on for two and a half hours, that Eino Rautio had said the word propriety eleven times, that Mrs. Maki had said the word hypocrite once and then apologized, and that in the end they had voted to table the whole question until the annual meeting in January, when the congregation would vote on the call itself.
"Tabled," said Arvo with disgust. "Like a pie."
Nora didn't come on Saturday. She didn't come on Wednesday. Birdie set the table for two and didn't say anything about it, which was worse than if she had. She had been moved up from donkey to angel because of chicken pox, and she practiced her one line in the bathtub every night, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, in a flat, careful voice, like someone reading a parts list.
On the third Thursday in December, the storm came.
It had been coming all day. You could feel it in the shop, the way the light went brown and flat at noon, the way the barometer on the office wall fell and kept falling. The radio out of Marquette started talking about it at three. By five the wind had swung around to the northwest, which on that shore meant the whole of Lake Superior was coming at you sideways, and the snow was blowing so hard across Superior Street that Dale couldn't see the Sunoco sign from the office window. He closed early. He picked Birdie up from Mrs. Pelto's and they went home and he made grilled cheese and tomato soup, and they listened to the wind trying to take the storm windows off the house, and at eight-fifteen the phone rang.