She did not tell him about the rule. She was beginning to suspect he could guess.
On the black-and-white television the Dallas game was on, and toward the end of the afternoon the men on the couch began to shout. The regular quarterback had been knocked out of the game, and some rookie nobody had ever heard of, a kid straight off the bench, had come in and was throwing the ball down the field like he didn't know he wasn't supposed to be able to. The whole firehouse ended up crowded around the little set, children on shoulders, wives with dish towels, Mrs. Pruitt in the kitchen doorway with her spoon, and when the kid threw a long pass in the last minute and the receiver caught it in the end zone, the apparatus floor of Station 2 erupted like the Fourth of July. Danny Fitch picked up Gus Amato and spun him in a circle. The cat fled. Cal turned to Nora in all that noise with his face lit up, and she turned to him, and for a moment it seemed the simplest thing in the world that he would kiss her, there, in the middle of all of it.
He didn't. He just looked at her. And she understood, from the way he looked, that he wouldn't — not here, not today, not with the plaque by the door and her mother's letter in her coat pocket and Gus Amato's grandchildren running around the pole. He was a man who knew how to wait. He was a man who stood one step below.
"Some game," he said instead.
"Some game," she agreed, and her heart was going like a drum.
*
By five o'clock it was dark again, and the families had begun to go home, bundling children into snowsuits, carrying sleeping babies out to idling station wagons, taking foil-covered plates of leftovers for the men on the night shift who'd be eating them at two in the morning. The long tables were a ruin of crumpled paper and cranberry stains. All four pies — Nora's three and a mincemeat from one of the wives that nobody had touched except Gus — were reduced to crumbs and a single sad wedge of pumpkin.