Outside the window over the sink the snow had stopped. The clouds had broken up, and through the gaps a few hard stars showed over the practice tower in the drill yard. The kitchen was warm and the water was hot and the radio on the shelf was playing something slow with a lot of strings, and Nora, standing there with her hands in the suds and this man beside her and an old woman dozing by the stove, thought: this is happiness. This is what it is. Not fireworks. Just this. Just warm water and a dish towel and someone beside you, drying.
"Nora," Cal said.
She looked up at him. He had stopped drying. He was holding a plate in one hand and the towel in the other and looking at her with an expression she couldn't read.
"I know this is —" he began, and stopped, and started again. "I know who your father was. I know what this place is to you. And I know I'm —" He gestured at himself, the uniform trousers, the T-shirt, the whole firehouse around them. "I know what I am. I'm not going to pretend I'm anything else. But I'd like to take you to dinner. A real one. Not on a holiday. Not with forty people and a cat. Saturday night, maybe, if the roads are clear. There's a place in Wellsboro that does a decent steak and doesn't play polkas, which up here is about the highest praise there is." He set the plate down. "You can say no. I'll understand. I'll still drive you home tonight and I'll still jump your car in the morning. But I'd regret it the rest of my life if I didn't ask."
Nora stood with her hands in the water. She felt the rule rise in her, the old unspoken rule, the dent in the doorframe. No men who run toward things. And she felt the other thing rising to meet it — the warm, unauthorized thing that had moved through her chest in the frozen-food aisle at Kessler's, that had gotten into his truck and walked eight blocks through a foot of snow with three pies in a hamper and stood with her bare hand on the bronze.
She opened her mouth to answer.
And the bell went off.