*
She could not drive, so she walked. She put the two pumpkin pies and the lattice apple into the big wicker picnic hamper that had been her grandmother's, wrapped in dish towels, and she pulled on her boots and her camel coat and a knitted green hat she had made herself the winter she was trying to learn to knit and had then given up, and she stepped out into the white world.
Sycamore Street was silent. A few people were out shoveling, their breath rising, and the scrape of their shovels carried a long way in the clean air. A boy was pulling his little sister on a sled down the middle of the street, which no car had yet touched. Over on Elm, somebody had already built a snowman and given it a pilgrim hat made of black construction paper, and it leaned slightly to the left, like a man who had had a long night. The snow was over the tops of her boots, and it went down inside them almost at once, and by the time she'd gone three blocks her feet were wet and cold and her arms ached from the hamper, and she thought several times about turning around.
She did not turn around. She went down Elm to Center Street, past the shuttered five-and-dime and the dark movie house, whose marquee still advertised a disaster picture about a jumbo jet in trouble, as if the whole country had decided that year to pay good money to watch things go wrong, and down Center to Mill, and there, on the corner, was Station 2.
It had been built in 1911 of dark red brick, and it had two tall arched doors painted fire-engine red, and a squat bell tower on top where the old whistle was mounted, and a stone over the doorway carved with the words HARLAN FALLS FIRE COMPANY — STATION 2 — ALWAYS READY. Somebody had already shoveled the apron in front of the doors, and salted it, and there were tire tracks and footprints and a pickup truck she recognized parked by the side wall, blue, rust on the wheel wells, a ladder rack across the bed. Through the small windows in the big red doors she could see the gleam of chrome and the red flank of the pumper inside. Smoke — clean smoke, kitchen smoke — rose from a stovepipe at the back. Somewhere in there a radio was playing, and men were laughing, and someone was banging a pot.
She had not been inside this building since she was twelve years old.
She stood on the sidewalk across the street with the hamper heavy in her arms and the snow sifting down on her green hat, and she could not make her feet go any farther.