Nora thought about it.
"Terrified," she said. "And like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."
Edith smiled and patted her hand and said, "That's it, dear. That's all it ever is." And then, because she was eighty years old and it was very late, she put her head down on her folded arms on the kitchen table and fell asleep, her lavender hat slightly askew, and Nora got up and found a blanket in the bunk room and put it over the old woman's shoulders, and sat back down, and kept the watch alone.
At four-fifteen the scanner said: All units, fire is knocked down. Ladder One, Engine Two, returning to quarters.
She went out onto the apparatus floor. The long tables had been folded away since Thursday, and the empty bays were cold and enormous, and she stood in the middle of them in her camel coat with the open doors before her and the night outside. Snow was falling, very gently, in the light from the bay. The town was asleep. Far off, coming down Center Street from the north, she heard the low growl of the diesels. No lights. No hurry.
The pumper rolled in first, and Gus Amato, high up behind the wheel, saw her standing there, and lifted his ruined hand from the wheel in a slow salute. Then the ladder truck backed in beside it, beeping, its great red flank sliding past her close enough to touch, and stopped, and the engine died, and in the sudden silence she heard the hiss of snow melting on hot metal.
He climbed down off the back step. He was soaked through and black with soot from the brim of his helmet to his boots, and his face was streaked gray and white where the sweat had run through the ash, and his mustache was frosted with ice, and he took off his helmet and stood holding it at his side and looked at her across the concrete as if he did not believe what he was seeing.