The first one was Hank Doyle, in his pickup, with Lorraine beside him.
Behind Hank came Dot Kessler, in her old Buick, with a thermos of coffee on the dashboard and a box of doughnuts on the seat.
Behind Dot came a car Leon did not recognize, and then another, and then a minivan, and then three more pickups, and then a big black SUV that he finally recognized, with some amazement, as belonging to Grady Pruitt.
They kept coming. They parked in rows across the church lot with their headlights on, engines running, steam coming out of their tailpipes in the cold.
Leon counted them. He counted them twice.
Twenty-three.
Hank got out and walked over to him, slowly, with his hands in his jacket pockets.
"Morning, Leon," he said.
"Hank," Leon said. "What is all this?"
Hank reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of poster board. He unfolded it under the porch light.
It was Leon's sign from the Calder Feed bulletin board. RIDES NEEDED. MONDAY.
Under DRIVERS SIGN HERE, there was not a single name.
"I took it down Saturday night," Hank said. "Before anybody could sign it."
Leon stared at him.
"Because six names wasn't enough," Hank said. "That's just Monday, Leon. What about Wednesday? Clarabelle needs Wednesday and Friday too. And next week. And the week after. This isn't a one-day problem. You've been carrying this whole town on your back for fifteen years in a van held together with tape. One sign-up sheet wasn't going to fix it."
He turned the poster board over.
On the back, in a dozen different handwritings, in pen and pencil and marker, were names. And next to each name, a day of the week.
There were three columns. The whole back of the poster was full.
"So we did it right," Hank said. "We spent all weekend on the phone. Dot ran it from the diner. Every day, Monday through Friday, between now and the time we get a new van. Two drivers every morning, two every afternoon. And a backup." He tapped the bottom of the list. "Grady volunteered for Thursdays."
Leon looked across the parking lot. Grady Pruitt was standing by his shiny SUV in a camel-hair coat, looking slightly embarrassed.
"He said it was good for his image," Hank said. "I don't care why."
Dot came over with the thermos and put a cup of coffee in Leon's hand.
"Drink that, hon," she said. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Dot," Leon said. "Twenty-three cars."
"Twenty-three cars this morning," Dot said. "Forty-one people on the list, all told. Some of them can only do Saturdays. Some can only do once a month." She looked at him over her glasses. "You've driven half my Tuesday pie customers to the doctor for fifteen years, Leon Mast. In the snow. You never once let anybody pay for gas. Did you think we forgot?"
Leon could not answer.
Clarabelle went to dialysis in Hank's truck, with Lorraine in the back seat holding her bag. Harvey and Mae Ellen went to Athens with a young couple from Creek Road who had just moved to town. Lester and Inez went to Marietta with Dot. Wanda went to Columbus in the black SUV with Grady Pruitt, who stopped at a drive-through and bought her a breakfast sandwich and asked her, to her great surprise, about her grandchildren.
Leon stood in the empty church parking lot with his coffee and watched the taillights go down Route 9 in the dark.
The other cars stayed. They were the Wednesday drivers and the Friday drivers. They had come anyway. They stood around in the parking lot in the cold and drank Dot's coffee and talked.
That was the morning the Tin Man Fund started.
It was never planned. It just happened, the way things happened in Pine Hollow.
Dot put her old cigar box by the cash register with a piece of masking tape on it that said NEW VAN. The VFW added a second Friday fish fry. The Liars' Table, after a long and heated discussion, agreed to give up the Thursday booth at Dot's for one week so it could be auctioned off. It went for four hundred dollars, to a dentist from Marietta who had always wanted to know what they talked about.
The Panthers football team held a car wash in the November cold, in sweatshirts, and raised nine hundred dollars. The third graders at the elementary school collected pennies in a pickle jar.
Calder Feed and Seed put up a new poster on the bulletin board. A big red thermometer, drawn in marker, from zero to thirty-eight thousand dollars.
Every week, somebody colored in a little more of it.
They reached thirty-eight thousand dollars on the second Sunday in Advent.
Pastor Sam announced it from the pulpit. The congregation stood up and applauded, which Methodists in Pine Hollow did not usually do.
The new van came the week before Christmas, from a dealer in Zanesville. A white fifteen-passenger van, three years old, with forty thousand miles and a wheelchair lift and a side door that closed all by itself.
Hank drove it home from Zanesville. He parked it in front of the church, by the steps, with a big red bow on the hood.
Leon came out of the church to look at it.
He walked all the way around it, slowly, the way he would have walked around a school bus in 1985, checking the tires, the lights, the doors.
Then he stopped at the driver's door.
On the side of the van, just below the window, somebody had painted two lines of small, neat white letters. Walt Brenner had painted them by hand.
GRACE METHODIST SENIOR VAN.
DRIVER: LEON MAST. SINCE 2011.
Leon stood there for a long time with his cap in his hands.
Behind him, on the church steps, Clarabelle Yost was waiting in her wool coat and her rain bonnet, with her dialysis bag.
"Leon," she said. "It's Monday. I've got six-thirty in Marietta."
Leon put his cap back on.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and opened her door.
And in the glove compartment, where only he would find it, Hank had left a brand-new roll of silver duct tape, with a note.
For old times' sake.