When the song ended—someone on the upright piano had been filling the silence Ruth's fiddle left behind—they stood a moment longer than strangers should. Ruth retrieved her instrument and finished restringing it with the spare he had carried for three winters without knowing why. Walt watched her fingers work the peg, the fine adjustments, the pluck and listen, pluck and listen, the way Eleanor used to.
"You play well," he said. It was inadequate, but true.
"I play for people who show up," Ruth answered. "Tonight that appears to be mostly you and the pie."
He glanced around. The Thanksgiving barn dance at the old Miller place had once drawn half the county—ranchers and teachers and kids home from Lincoln, tables heavy with turkey and cranberry, the floor packed until midnight. This year the flu had gone through town, and the churches had held their own dinners, and the Miller boys had moved to Omaha. What remained was a stubborn handful: Margaret and her husband Dale; the Whitakers from the next section; a few teenagers who had nowhere better to be; Mrs. Henshaw, who brought three pies every year whether anyone asked or not. And Ruth Callahan, standing alone near the makeshift stage with a fiddle and a prairie dress, as if she had wandered out of a different decade and decided to stay.
"You're not from around here," Walt said.