She looked. A boy of about seven in a red sweater was swinging around the brass pole with one hand, shrieking, while a smaller girl in pigtails chased him with what appeared to be a turkey drumstick made of construction paper. They were loud and sticky and alive, and they had no idea, none at all, what they owed to a man with red hair who had died before they were born.
"Thank you," Nora said, and didn't know what she was thanking him for, and didn't care, and put her arms around Gus Amato, who smelled of Old Spice and mothballs and, very faintly, underneath, the stubborn ghost of smoke, and held on.
*
They sat down at two-fifteen. Captain Ruddock said grace, gruffly, with his head bowed over his folded hands, and at the end he added, "And for the ones who aren't at the table," and forty voices said Amen. Mrs. Pruitt carved the turkey herself, standing at the head of the table with a long knife held in her good hand, her bad wrist braced against the platter, and she would not let anyone help her, not even Cal, who hovered at her elbow like a man watching a toddler near a staircase. The first slice went onto a plate that she set down, carefully, in front of the empty chair at the head of the table, beside the lattice pie. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody needed to.
Cal sat beside Nora. She wasn't sure how that happened; she thought maybe Mrs. Pruitt had arranged it, the way she seemed to arrange most things. Their elbows touched when they passed the potatoes. His knee brushed hers under the table, and he moved it away, and then a little later it was back, and he didn't move it away again, and neither did she.
They talked. It was easier than she'd expected. He told her about growing up in Erie, the third of five, his father a welder at the shipyard and his mother a cook at the Polish Falcons hall, a house that smelled always of cabbage and lake water. He told her he'd joined the department in Erie at twenty-two because a friend dared him to take the test, and stayed seven years, and came to Harlan Falls when his marriage ended — he said it plainly, without self-pity, a young marriage, too young, she'd wanted a man who came home at five and he couldn't blame her for that. He told her he liked the quiet here. He told her he liked that he knew the names of the people whose houses he went into. He told her he built birdhouses in his garage on his days off and gave them away to anybody who'd take them, and that there were at this point probably forty Dombrowski birdhouses scattered around the county, and that it was his secret ambition to provide housing for every chickadee in Potter County.
She told him about her second-graders. About the boy who bit people and the girl who could already read at a fifth-grade level and hid it so the others wouldn't tease her. About the classroom hamster, whose name was Gerald Ford, because the children had voted in September and the vote had been extremely close. About the house on Sycamore Street and the dent in the doorframe and the radio that was never changed because of the toaster.