Nora laughed. She couldn't help it. She stood in the steamy green kitchen with a potato masher in her hand and laughed until her eyes watered, and Cal stood in the doorway with his arms full of bowls and laughed with her, and Mrs. Pruitt stirred the gravy and pretended not to be pleased with herself, and something in Nora's chest that had been held tight for a very long time loosened, just slightly, just a notch, like a belt let out after a meal.
She mashed the potatoes. She did it properly — butter, warm milk, salt, a little white pepper, the way her mother had taught her — and Mrs. Pruitt tasted them off the end of a teaspoon and nodded once, which Cal informed her later was the highest honor the kitchen at Station 2 could bestow. She carried bowls out to the long tables. She was introduced to people whose names she immediately forgot — wives and children and a huge, shy probationary fireman named Danny Fitch who was twenty-one and called her ma'am and looked at Cal with open hero-worship. She met Captain Leo Ruddock, a barrel-chested man going gray at the temples, with a voice like a tugboat, who shook her hand and held it a moment too long and said, "I was on the line that night, Miss Haverty. I was twenty-three. Your father taught me how to tie a bowline," and then let go and walked away very fast to see about the rolls.
And then, just before they sat down, a man came up to her by the end of the table.
He was older than the others, close to sixty, thin and stooped, with a face like a walnut and a left hand that was badly scarred, the fingers drawn in and stiff. He was wearing a sport coat over his uniform shirt, and a tie, and he held his good hand out to her and she took it, and it was trembling.
"Gus Amato," he said. "Engineer. I drive the pumper." He swallowed. "I've worked here thirty-one years, Miss Haverty. I been wanting to talk to you for sixteen of them."
Nora looked at his scarred hand. She looked at his face. And she knew, the way you know things in dreams, before anyone tells you.
"It was you," she said. "He went back in for you."