"I did go out of my mind," she said finally. "Some nights. I won't lie to you. There were nights I paced the floor till the sun came up. There were nights I made him promise to quit, and he promised, and then the whistle blew and he went anyway, and I hated him for it, and I hated myself for loving a man who'd do that. I lost two babies, early on, and he was out on calls both times." She turned her wedding band around on her finger. "But here's the thing nobody tells you, Nora. I'd have spent those nights waiting for something no matter who I married. Everybody waits. Your mother waited for your father to come home from the war before she ever waited for him to come home from a fire. Mothers wait for children. Wives wait for the doctor to call back. Everybody who loves anybody is waiting for something, every day of their lives, whether they know it or not. You can't get out of the waiting. All you get to choose is who you're waiting for." She smiled a little. "I chose Walter Pruitt. He was worth every hour."
Nora looked at the scanner. Its little red lights flickered, flickered, flickered.
"My mother waited for the rest of her life," she said. "For somebody who wasn't coming. She sat by the phone in the dark. I'd come home from a date and she'd be sitting there. Sixteen years. I watched her do it. I swore I'd never — I swore I'd never be her."
"I know you did," said Mrs. Pruitt gently. "I watched you swear it. I was at that funeral, too. You were twelve years old and you didn't cry once, not once, and I remember thinking, that child is building a wall, and she's going to live behind it for a long time."
Nora stood up so fast that the chair scraped. She didn't mean to. Her body just did it, the way Cal's body had turned toward the door when the alarm rang. The kitchen was too small. The scanner was too loud. Somewhere out on Quarry Road a house was burning in the dark and Cal Dombrowski was standing in front of it, and if a floor gave way, if a wall came down, if a ceiling fell, she would hear it here, on this gray box, in this green kitchen, the way her mother had heard the whistle, and she could not — she could not —
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Pruitt. I have to go."
"Nora —"