"That's a lot of skills."
"I know all the parts of a carburetor. Do you want me to say them?"
"Maybe another time," said Dale. He had the car up on the jack now and the flat off, and he rolled it back along the gravel and swung the doughnut up onto the studs.
The woman was quiet a moment. When Dale glanced up she was looking at him, not at Birdie, and her face had changed a little. In the near dark it was hard to say how. She had a long face, freckled across the bridge of the nose, and eyes that were maybe green and maybe gray. She was somewhere in her thirties, a few years older than him, he guessed. There was mud on the hem of her good coat where she'd knelt in it.
"Perhaps you could teach me sometime?" she said.
He thought she was joking. People said things like that, to be nice to a kid. Then he saw she wasn't.
"Teach you what, exactly?"
"Any of it. All of it. Tires. Oil. Whatever a person ought to know who's going to be driving these roads by herself all winter." She pulled her coat tighter. "I've just moved up from the Twin Cities. I'm going to be doing a lot of miles between here and Wetmore and Shingleton and every farm road in between, and I've been told by more than one person, very kindly, that I won't last till Easter. I'd like to prove them wrong. I'd rather not do it by freezing to death in a ditch." She smiled, but only partly. "I'd pay you. I'm not asking for charity."
"What sort of work has you out on every farm road in the county?"
"I'm with Bethany," she said. "In town. And Zion, out in Wetmore. It's a two-point parish, they share."
So she was the church secretary after all, or the parish visitor, or whatever they called it, one of those women who brought the casseroles and drove the shut-ins to their doctor's appointments. Dale's mouth went a little tight without his meaning it to, and he bent back over the lug nuts so she wouldn't see. He did them in a star. Birdie watched to make sure.
"Saturdays," he heard himself say. "Mornings. We open at seven, but it's slow till nine or so. Bring the car, we'll get you a real tire on it anyway, and I'll show you whatever you want to know."
"Saturday," said the woman. "I'll be there."