Birdie came down the steps behind them with her halo crooked and a piece of coffee cake in each hand, saw their hands, and stopped. She did not say anything at all, for once. She just looked, a long careful look, the way she'd looked at the Mackinac Bridge. Then she came and stood between them, on the step, and handed each of them a piece of coffee cake, and leaned back against her father's legs, and stayed.
* * *
The annual meeting of Bethany Lutheran Church was held on the third Sunday in January, in the basement, with a hundred and twenty-one voting members present, which Mrs. Pelto said was a record going back to the Korean War.
Eino Rautio asked to speak before the vote. He stood up at the front of the room in his suit, and took a paper bag out of his coat pocket, and out of the paper bag he took a pair of ruined women's nylon stockings, the color the package called Suntan, frayed in one leg and gone black and shiny with grease, and he held them up in front of the whole congregation of Bethany Lutheran Church without the least embarrassment.
"I said," Eino Rautio announced, "that a woman could not manage the roads. I said that in this room. I want to tell you what I found in my mother's yard."
He told them. It did not take long. When he was finished he folded the stockings up and put them back in the paper bag, and sat down, and folded his arms across his chest, and set his jaw like a man waiting out a toothache.
The vote to extend the call of the Reverend Nora Brennan as regular pastor of Bethany and Zion was one hundred and twelve to nine. Arvo Kangas, who was not a member and had not been inside a church since his wife's funeral in 1971, was found afterward to have voted twice.
* * *
In June, when the lilacs came out along Elm Street and the lake turned blue again, Dale finally repainted the sign. HAAPALA'S SERVICE, REPAIRS, TOWING, all the letters, and underneath it, in smaller letters that Birdie insisted on and painted herself with her tongue between her teeth, WINTER CAR CARE CLASSES, SATURDAYS, ASK FOR THE PASTOR.
There had been eleven women in the first class, in February. There were twenty-six by April. Mrs. Lindberg came, and both Pelto sisters, and Eino Rautio's wife with her new glasses. Nora taught the tires and the oil and the belts. Birdie taught the star pattern. Arvo taught the nylons, every time, and every time told the story about his wife on the Seney stretch in nineteen hundred and fifty-four, and every time it got a little longer.
On a warm night at the end of June, after Birdie was asleep and Mrs. Pelto was on the couch with the television, Dale drove Nora out to Sand Point and they walked down to the edge of the lake in the dark.
It was the shortest night of the year, near enough, and still the sky stayed light a long time out over Grand Island, pale green going to blue, and the water came in over the stones so clear and cold you could see every one of them.
He'd thought about how to do it for a month. Birdie had suggested church, in front of everyone, and he had vetoed it. In the end he just stopped walking, at the edge of the water, and turned to her.