"I can hear you," said Dale.
"I know. You're not very good at it. You're good at everything else."
Nora's eyes came up to his over Birdie's head, and there was a question in them, and he understood that she was asking permission. Not Birdie's. His.
He found he couldn't speak. He nodded.
"Would you like me to do them over?" Nora said to Birdie. "They're coming out in the back. I used to do my sisters' hair every morning before school. There were four of us. I've got a lot of practice."
Birdie went very still. Then she said, "Okay," in a voice that was trying so hard to be casual that it was almost no voice at all, and she turned around on the tire and sat up straight with her back to Nora, and Nora pulled the rubber bands out and combed her fingers through his daughter's hair, the fine brown hair that was Karen's hair exactly, and began.
Dale went and found something to do with the air compressor.
When he looked back the braids were done. They were tight and even and lay flat against Birdie's head and ended in two neat brushes with the rubber bands wrapped twice, and Birdie kept reaching back to touch them, carefully, the way you'd touch something that might come apart. Nora was washing her hands at the slop sink. She didn't make anything of it. She didn't look at him to see how he'd taken it. She just said, over her shoulder, "Same time next week? I want to learn the oil."
"Same time," said Dale.
"How much do I owe you? For today."
He told her for the tire and the jack and nothing for the lesson, and she argued, and he said the pulla was the lesson fee, and she argued some more, and finally she wrote a check on the hood of the Volaré, leaning on the fender, and handed it to him. It was drawn on the First National Bank of Munising, and the checks were new, and printed under her name in small careful letters was an address on Maple Street that Dale knew. It was the brick house next to Bethany Lutheran. It had been the parsonage for as long as he'd been alive.
So she was living in the parsonage. Well. Pastor Aho had retired in July and gone to his daughter's in Florida, and the church would have needed someone in the house to keep the pipes from freezing until they found somebody new. A secretary, a parish worker. It made sense.
He folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. He did not think anything more of it.