The Oldsmobile made a sound like an old man clearing his throat, and then made no sound at all.
She turned it again. Click.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Mrs. Pruitt.
*
It was the battery, of course. It was always the battery in November. Calvin Dombrowski — Cal, he said, when Nora called him Mr. Dombrowski, nobody but Mrs. Pruitt and the tax man called him Calvin — brought the blue Ford around nose to nose with the Oldsmobile and got a pair of cables out from behind the seat, and Nora stood beside him in the snow holding a flashlight he'd handed her and trying to keep the beam where he wanted it.
"Little to the left," he said, bent under the great plum-colored hood. "There. Hold it there."
She held it there. The light made a small bright world of the engine, the black clamps, his bare hands working in the cold. He had good hands, square and scarred across the back of the left one with a patch of shiny skin the size of a silver dollar. She found herself looking at the scar and then made herself look at the battery instead.
"You knew my father's name," she said.