Nora stood on the step above him with her car keys in her hand and her mother's letter folded in the pocket of her robe, where she had put it when she came downstairs that morning, and she wanted to say yes so badly that it frightened her worse than the scanner had.
"I need some time," she said. "Can you — I just need a little time."
He nodded. He did not argue. He did not try to talk her into anything. He simply nodded, the way he had nodded in the frozen-food aisle when she told him about her twelve relatives, as though she had made an excellent point.
"I'm on shift tomorrow night," he said. "Six to six. If you want to find me, you know where the building is." He turned to go, and then turned back. "And Nora? The place in Wellsboro. The steak place. It's not going anywhere. Neither am I."
He walked off down Sycamore Street through the snow with his hands in the pockets of his suede jacket, and she watched him all the way to the corner, and he did not look back once, and she understood that he was not looking back on purpose, so that she would not feel she had to wave.
*
All day Friday she cleaned the house. All day Saturday she graded spelling tests and made a pot of soup from the turkey carcass Mrs. Pruitt had sent home with her wrapped in foil, and she listened to the radio, and she did not think about anything at all, and she thought about only one thing.