She had walked out of the firehouse so she would not have to wait. And here she was. Waiting.
Everybody waits, Mrs. Pruitt had said. All you get to choose is who you're waiting for.
Nora put her hand in the pocket of her camel coat and found the envelope Gus Amato had given her. She had forgotten it. She took it out and held it in the dark, and then she reached up and pulled the little chain on the lamp on the telephone table, and in the small yellow circle of light she opened it.
The paper was blue, the good stationery her mother had kept in the secretary in the living room for thank-you notes and condolences. The date at the top was February 11, 1959. One year.
Dear Gus, it said.
Thank you for your letter. You must stop apologizing to me. I mean that. I want you to listen to me now the way Frank would have wanted you to listen, and then I want you to put this away and not take it out again.
Frank went back in because he was Frank. I knew that about him the night I met him, at the Grange dance in Galeton in the summer of 1941, when he left me standing by the punch bowl in my new dress to go help a stranger whose car had gone into the ditch out front. I was furious. He came back forty minutes later covered in mud to the knees and asked me to dance, and I thought, well, Anne, there it is, that's the man, and if you want him you're going to have to want all of him. I married him knowing. I would marry him again tomorrow, knowing.