"Do you think she's married?"
"Bird."
"I'm only asking. She didn't have a ring. I looked."
"Of course you looked."
"I'm only saying," Birdie said, to the window, in a smaller voice, "that she could come to dinner sometime. If she wanted. If she doesn't know anybody. She said she just moved."
Dale didn't answer that. He drove, the lake black on the left and the woods black on the right. He thought about the woman sitting in her car with her hands on the wheel before she started it. He thought about Saturday.
He thought, God help me, a church lady.
Then he reached over without looking and tucked a loose piece of his daughter's hair back behind her ear, and she let him, and Huey Lewis came on again, and she sang about wanting a new truck all the rest of the way home.
* * *
Haapala's Service sat on the corner of Superior and Elm, two bays and an office and a pair of Sunoco pumps out front that Arvo Kangas tended like a man tending sheep. Dale's father had built it in 1951 with a GI loan and a borrowed cement mixer. The sign was still the one his father had painted, HAAPALA'S SERVICE, REPAIRS, TOWING, though the S had flaked so that from the road it said ERVICE, and every summer Dale meant to redo it.
She came at five minutes to nine on Saturday, in the Volaré, on the doughnut. She was wearing blue jeans that still had the creases in them from the store and a flannel shirt that was too big and looked like it belonged to somebody else, and her hair was tied back with a green scarf. She had brought a thermos of coffee and a box of cardamom bread from the Finnish bakery on Cedar Street, and Arvo, who had not spoken to a woman voluntarily since Eisenhower, took a slice and said, "Pulla. From Hiltunen's. Is good," which for Arvo was practically a toast at a wedding.
"I didn't know what you're supposed to bring a mechanic," Nora said.
"Money, mostly," said Dale. "But the pulla's nice."