He kissed her in the open door of Station 2 with the snow falling behind them in the light, and he tasted of smoke and cold and coffee, and his hands on either side of her face were rough and careful and still shaking slightly from the night, and the soot from his coat came off all down the front of her good camel coat and she did not care, she would never care, she would keep that coat unwashed in the back of her closet for the next forty years. Behind them the other men were climbing down from the trucks and pretending, loudly and badly, not to look. Danny Fitch whistled. Somebody told him to shut up. Gus Amato said, to no one in particular, in a voice thick with something that was not smoke, "Well, Frank. Well, would you look at that."
And in the kitchen doorway, with a blanket around her shoulders and her lavender hat askew, Edith Pruitt stood watching, one hand pressed flat over her heart.
*
Every year after that, on the night before Thanksgiving, a tall man with a graying mustache and a woman with auburn hair went to Kessler's Market just before closing, though there was no reason to, though their turkey had been ordered weeks in advance and was waiting for them in the cold case with their name on it, spelled correctly, in Art Kessler's son's careful hand. They went anyway. They walked the length of the frozen-food case together, past the empty bays, all the way to the corner where the frost built up, and they stood there a minute, and somebody always said, "Don't you dare," and somebody always laughed.
Edith Pruitt cooked the Station 2 turkey for four more years, until she was eighty-four, and on the fifth year she sat at the head of the table, in the chair where Walter used to sit, and watched Nora Dombrowski carve it with Edith's own long knife, and said that the slices were too thick, and ate every one.
And in the house on Sycamore Street, on the bench by the black rotary telephone at the foot of the stairs, where the cushion still dipped from all those years of nights, a woman sometimes sat in the dark, listening for trucks coming home down Center Street. But she did not sit there the way her mother had. She sat there the way her mother had written about, in blue ink, on the good stationery — not waiting for someone who wasn't coming, but for someone who was. Someone worth every hour. Someone who would come up the walk at dawn smelling of smoke, and stop one step below her on the porch, close enough to catch, and say, the way he always did, the way he always would, "Anything left of that pie?"
And there always was. She always made sure of it. She always saved him a slice.