"I can fix almost anything," he said. "Birdie's right about that. I'm good with my hands. I'm no good with words, and I've never once been good at the things you can't fix. You're good at those. You know how to sit behind the screen with people. I don't. I walked out."
"You came back," said Nora.
"I came back. I'd like to keep coming back." He took a breath. "I don't know how to ask this right. So I'm asking it wrong. Will you marry me? Will you marry us, I mean. Birdie and me. She's asked me to say that she's included. She was very firm."
Nora Brennan stood at the edge of Lake Superior in the long green dusk with her red hair coming down from its pins in the wind, and laughed, and cried, and did not say anything for so long that he started to get worried.
"I'm a pastor," she said finally. "I've married about forty couples. I've never once been asked. I don't think I know how to do my part."
"That's all right," said Dale. "Perhaps we could teach you sometime."
"Yes," she said, and put her cold hands on either side of his face, the way she had under the one bulb in the shop on Thanksgiving. "Yes. To all of it. Both of you. Yes."
They drove home slow, with the windows down and the lake going dark beside them, and when they turned in at the house he put on his blinker, though there was nobody on the street at all to see it, and she laughed at him, and he let her.
Birdie was awake. She was sitting at the top of the stairs in her nightgown with her knees pulled up, and her hair in two braids, done by her own hand, a little lopsided, coming loose in the back.
"Well?" she said.
"She said yes," said Dale.
Birdie closed her eyes. She sat there a moment, very still, the way she had on the overturned tire in the shop the first Saturday when a stranger had asked if she could do her hair. Then she opened them.
"Good," said Birdie Haapala. "Then tomorrow I'll teach you the carburetor. All the parts. I've been waiting."