*
The cab of the Ford smelled of coffee and wet suede and something underneath that she couldn't name at first and then could: smoke. Not cigarette smoke. The other kind. The deep, stubborn smell of burned wood and wet ash that gets into a man's skin and his clothes and his truck and never entirely leaves. She knew that smell. She hadn't smelled it in sixteen years, and it went into her so fast and so deep that for a second she could not breathe at all, and then she rolled the window down an inch, and the cold came in, and she could.
"Sorry," he said. "Heater's either off or the surface of the sun. No in-between."
"It's fine."
Ahead of them the Oldsmobile's taillights glowed red through the snow, moving at the stately pace of a parade float. Mrs. Pruitt drove exactly twenty-two miles an hour and signaled every turn a full block in advance. Cal hung back, wipers thumping, the radio low on a station out of Williamsport that was playing a song about a man who couldn't get back home in time for the holidays.
"So twenty firefighters," Nora said, after a while.
"Twenty-one, counting the captain. Not all at once. It's a long day. We're a paid department, which in a town this size means we're about eight guys short of what we need and everybody pulls double. Holiday shifts go to whoever lost the coin toss, and a lot of the fellows bring their families by, so it ends up being more like forty people by the time the pumpkin pie comes out." He glanced at her. "Mrs. Pruitt's cooked the bird for the station since before the war. Her husband was chief for twenty-two years. Walter Pruitt. He passed in sixty-nine. She kept coming anyway. Every year, she shows up at ten in the morning with her roasting pan and an apron and runs that kitchen like an aircraft carrier."