She went in and closed the door and stood in the dark front hall with her back against it until she heard the engine turn over and the truck pull away, the sound of its tires muffled to almost nothing by the snow.
*
She baked anyway. She had always baked on the night before Thanksgiving, and she did not know how not to.
She had bought her pumpkin back in October, a real one from the Amish stand on Route 44, and had cooked it down and frozen it in quart jars for exactly this purpose, because her mother had always said that canned pumpkin was for people who had given up. She had apples in the cold cellar, Northern Spies from the orchard up past the reservoir, and she had flour and lard and sugar in the pantry because she had bought them on Sunday, before the town lost its collective mind. So she put on her mother's apron, the blue one with the faded cherries, and she turned on the radio on top of the refrigerator, and she rolled out crust on the old enamel-topped table while the snow piled up against the kitchen window and the furnace clanked and grumbled in the cellar like a bad-tempered dog.
She made two pumpkin and one apple, and then, because her hands still needed something to do, she made another apple, with a lattice top, the way her father had liked it.
That was the thing about the house. Everything in it was a way somebody had liked something. The lattice was her father. The cherries on the apron were her mother. The radio was always tuned to the station out of Williamsport because her father had once, in 1955, called in and won a toaster, and her mother had refused ever to change it in case it happened again. Nora had been living here alone for two years among these small loyalties, and she kept them all, every one, the way you'd keep a lamp lit in a window for someone you knew perfectly well wasn't coming.
At eleven o'clock, with the last pie in the oven and flour up to her elbows, she let herself think about it.