The night of February eleventh, 1958. She had been in bed, not sleeping, reading a library book under the covers with a flashlight — the irony of the flashlight did not escape her tonight, standing in the snow beside a stranger with the beam pointed at an engine — and she had heard the fire whistle go at the station on Mill Street, three long blasts, the signal for a general alarm. In those days every man in the department lived within the sound of that whistle. She heard her father's feet hit the floor in the next room. She heard his voice, low, and her mother's voice, lower. She heard him come down the hall, and she switched off the flashlight and pretended to be asleep, because she knew he would look in, and he did. He stood in her doorway for a moment in his undershirt with his suspenders hanging down, a big shape against the hall light, and he said, very quietly, "Night, Red," the way he always did. And then he was on the stairs and out the door, and she heard his car start in the cold.
She remembered that her mother did not go back to bed. She remembered lying awake listening to her mother moving around downstairs, making coffee, running water, putting dishes away that were already put away. She remembered falling asleep at some point toward morning and waking to a sound she had never heard before and would never be able to describe to anyone, a sound that was coming from the kitchen, and going down the stairs in her nightgown, and seeing Chief Walter Pruitt standing in their front hall with his helmet in his hands and his face black with soot, and behind him, on the porch, a small woman in a dark coat whom Nora did not then recognize, who came forward past the chief and went straight into the kitchen to Nora's mother and put her arms around her and held on.
Edith Pruitt. She had been sixty-four years old then. She would have been wearing a different coat. Nora had forgotten her entirely, had folded her into the general darkness of that morning, and tonight, in the parking lot of Kessler's Market, a hand in a white kid glove had touched her sleeve, and the memory had come up out of her like something surfacing from deep water.
After that her mother had waited, in a sense, for the rest of her life. Not for him — she knew he wasn't coming — but in the posture of waiting, the habit of it. She would startle when the fire whistle blew. She would go to the window when she heard sirens. She would say, every time Nora left the house, "Call me when you get there," and if Nora forgot, she would find her mother sitting by the telephone in the front hall in the dark. She had been a widow at thirty-six. She never remarried. She never, as far as Nora knew, so much as went to dinner with a man. "I had my one," she used to say. "I'm not greedy."
Nora had dated, of course. She was not a nun. There had been a boy in college at Mansfield State, and a pharmacist in Wellsboro who was kind and dull and wanted very much to marry her, and a lawyer from Harrisburg the summer she was twenty-five who turned out to have a wife in Camp Hill. But there was a rule she had never spoken aloud, not even to herself, a rule that lived in her the way the dent lived in the kitchen doorframe. No men who ran toward things. No policemen, no soldiers, no miners, no men who went up on high steel. No firemen. Above all, no firemen. She would not spend her life standing by a window listening for sirens. She would not wake up one morning to a sound coming from the kitchen.
And tonight she had stood in the frozen-food aisle at Kessler's and said, out loud, to a firefighter, that it was hot.
"Well, it was," she told the oven, a little defiantly. The oven had no opinion. She took out the lattice pie and set it on the windowsill to cool, and its crust was perfect, golden and blistered, and the smell of apples and cinnamon filled the kitchen so completely that for a moment the house felt full.