"Haverty," she said. "You're Frank Haverty's girl."
Nora felt it the way she always felt it — that name, in that particular tone, said by somebody old enough to remember. Like stepping off a curb you didn't know was there. She had been twelve when the bell rang at Station 2 on a February night in 1958, and her father had gone out on the pumper to the Brandt Furniture warehouse on Water Street, and he had not come back. Sixteen years. There were still people in Harlan Falls who said her name that way, as though it were a dish they had to carry carefully.
"Yes," she said. "I am."
Beside her, Calvin Dombrowski had gone very still.
Mrs. Pruitt reached out with one white-gloved hand and touched Nora's sleeve, just once, lightly, the way you would touch a horse you didn't want to startle.
"You have his hair," she said. "He had the reddest hair in this town, and your mother used to say it was the only thing about him that ever ran hot." Then, briskly, as if the moment had been a door she'd opened only long enough to look through, she turned back to the firefighter. "Put that bird on the front seat, Calvin. Seat belt it in, if you would. It's twenty pounds and I don't want it sliding into the dash."
He did as he was told. Nora watched him lean into the big front seat of the Oldsmobile and buckle the lap belt over the frozen turkey with great care, as though it might wake.
Mrs. Pruitt climbed in behind the wheel. She was so small that she had a cushion on the seat to see over the dashboard, a needlepoint cushion with a pattern of violets. She put the key in the ignition and turned it.