*
Inside, the firehouse was warm and loud and smelled of roasting turkey and coffee and diesel and floor wax, and for a moment the sheer life of it stopped her in the doorway. The big apparatus floor had been transformed. The pumper and the ladder truck had been backed out onto the apron in the snow — "Just for the afternoon," Cal said, "we can roll in two minutes" — and in their place three long tables had been set end to end down the middle of the concrete, covered in white paper and lined with folding chairs. There were paper turkeys taped to the poles. There was a television on a rolling cart in the corner, black and white, its rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil, showing a football game to a semicircle of men and boys on a sagging couch. There were children everywhere — little ones chasing each other around the brass pole in the corner, a baby asleep in a bassinet on top of a stack of folded hose, two teenage girls sitting on the running board of the old antique hand-pumper the department kept for parades, whispering. There were wives in good dresses and aprons, carrying casseroles. There was a tortoiseshell cat asleep on top of the television, its tail twitching across the screen.
And at the back of it all, in the doorway of the station kitchen, in a lavender dress with a white bib apron over it and a wooden spoon in her good hand and a flesh-colored elastic brace on the other wrist, stood Edith Pruitt, directing traffic.
"Danny Fitch, those rolls do not go in until the bird comes out, I don't care what your mother does. Leo, if you touch that gravy one more time I will tell the whole table about Atlantic City. Calvin! Where did you go? The potatoes won't mash themselves —" She saw Nora. She stopped. A slow smile came over her face, the smile of a woman who has been proven right about something and intends to enjoy it.
"Well," said Mrs. Pruitt. "There she is. I told him you'd come. He didn't believe me."
"I said I hoped," Cal said.
"You said, and I quote, 'She's got twelve relatives, Mrs. Pruitt,' in a voice like someone had shot your dog." She held out her good hand. "Come here, dear. Let me see what you brought."