"I know."
"Twelve."
"I heard you the first time," he said. "It was very compelling. You said it like a general reporting the size of the enemy."
*
Her house was on Sycamore Street, eight blocks from the station, a narrow two-story frame house painted white with green shutters that needed painting again. Her father had bought it in 1946 when he came home from the Pacific, and her mother had lived in it until the cancer finally took her two springs ago, and now Nora lived in it alone, with the good china and the bad furnace and the dent in the kitchen doorframe where she'd run into it on her tricycle when she was four.
Cal pulled up out front and turned off the engine, and for a moment they sat in the ticking quiet with the snow falling on the windshield and slowly erasing the world.
"I'm sorry," he said, "about your turkey."