"I'm telling you so you'll know I have it. And I'm telling you because I think you should be the one to tell her I have it. Before I do anything with it. You owe her that. You owe her a lot more than that, but you could start there."
He took that, too. He nodded slowly, his eyes on the mountains.
"And next October," Cassia said, "I'm on register nine. Seven to three. I'm putting in for the day now so nobody else gets it."
He turned and looked at her.
"You don't have to go to the Walmart," she said. "That's all. That's all I'm saying."
He did not try to hug her. He seemed to understand that it would have been a step onto ice she had not tested. He put on his gloves, and swung his leg over the bike, his knees taking their time about it, and he sat a moment with his hands on the grips. Then he reached back without looking and touched the lid of the coffee can through the saddlebag, and started the engine, and the low heavy sound of it went through the asphalt and into the soles of her shoes. She felt it in the floor of herself, the way you feel thunder in a house. Something in her, older than memory, turned toward it like a sleeper turning toward a window.
She watched him pull out onto Court Street and turn north at the light.
Then she sat in the Corolla with the heater running and took the doll out of her pocket and stood her on the dashboard facing out, so she could see the parking lot. She took out her phone. There was a text from Gaby that said ALIVE? in capitals and a text from her father that said only, Your mother froze the cake. No pressure. Love, Dad. She wrote back to him, Sunday. Tell her I'm still mad. Tell her I'm coming anyway. And she watched the three dots appear and disappear and appear again, and then a single word, Okay, and she knew without being told that her mother was standing in the kitchen on Lakeview Avenue holding the phone in both hands.
Then she unfolded the slip. She looked at the ten digits for a long time. She opened a new message and typed them in, and the phone showed her an empty conversation with a stranger in Grand Junction who had once walked her down to a river in the dark because she thought that was where safe was.
She typed one word.
Three.
She did not send it. Not yet. She left it there in the box with the cursor blinking after it, patient as a heartbeat, and put the car in gear, and the one-armed princess on the dashboard rode with her down Court Street, looking out the window, so that nobody was by themselves.