Dale came around the bed. He knelt down in front of her chair on the braided rug and put his arms around her, coat and wet hair and all, and she let him. She held on to the front of his Carhartt with both fists.
"Two hundred and twelve," she said into his shoulder.
"No," said Dale. "Not this one. You got here. You got here, Nora. That's not the same. That's not the book."
She didn't answer. She just held on.
They were still like that an hour later when the county plow came grinding up the old Doty road with its blade throwing a white wave and its amber light turning, and behind it, crawling in its track, a gray Oldsmobile with snow tires Dale had mounted himself. Eino Rautio got out in the yard. He was unshaven and gray in the face and still wearing his good suit from the hospital in Green Bay, and he had driven all night by back roads, three hundred miles, to get home to his mother.
He stopped in the yard beside the Volaré. Dale saw him through the front window. He saw Eino stand there looking at the open hood and the stockings on the pulleys, and the shredded belt in the snow, for a long time.
Then the old man came up onto the porch and into the house, and into the front room, and stood looking at his mother in the bed, and at the pastor in the kitchen chair with grease on her face and her bare legs raw with cold, and at Dale beside her.
Nora stood up. "Mr. Rautio," she said. "I'm so sorry. She went very peacefully. About four. She wasn't alone."
Eino looked at her.
"She sang," said the Lahti girl from the doorway. Her voice was hoarse. "They sang to her. In Finnish. The Christmas one. She liked it. She smiled."
Eino Rautio's face did something then that Dale had never seen it do in thirty-four years of living in the same town with him. It came apart. It came apart all at once, like Birdie's braid at the kitchen table. He sat down hard on the end of the bed and put his hand on his mother's feet under the quilt, and bowed his head, and his shoulders shook.
After a while Nora sat down next to him. She didn't say anything. She just sat. Behind the screen, Dale thought. That's where she goes. That's what she's for.
He went out to the kitchen to make fresh coffee, and to give them the room.