On the second of January, Gordie drove to Gillette. He went at five in the morning in the dark, with a thermos of Stevo's coffee and a pasty and the Folgers can, which now said four hundred and twelve dollars on its masking tape, and when he called on the night of the third from a motel on Highway 59 he said the interview had gone fine, it had gone well, he thought, they'd let him know in a week, and the wind down there blew like the devil and there wasn't a tree as far as you could see.
"How's the house?" he said.
"Still for sale," said Lauren.
"Well," Gordie said. "We'll see."
"We'll see," she said, and she meant it, both ways, and she knew that he knew she did. They had not decided anything. She had told herself all fall that she did not know how to leave Butte. It came to her now that she had not known how to stay in it, either, not really, not the way Johanna had, with a key and a shovel and three old men, and that it might turn out to be the same lesson, whichever way they went.
The next morning at twenty past seven, Johanna Treloar came into the Gallus Frame in her black wool coat with the little fur collar, which smelled faintly of Tomo's Mentholatum and always would, and a pair of new mittens over the gauze, and sat down on the bad stool by the kitchen door. Lauren poured her coffee. Black. Johanna took off the mittens and laid them together on the counter, and drank, and didn't say anything for a while, and then she reached into the pocket of the coat, slowly, with her stiff bandaged fingers, and took out four dimes and set them down in a row beside the cup.
Lauren looked at the dimes. She looked at Johanna. The old woman looked straight back at her, with those pale washed eyes, and one corner of her mouth went up, just slightly.
"Full price," Johanna said. "I'm told I've got a place to live."
Lauren picked up the dimes and rang them in. Over their heads, through the ceiling, faint as a radio in another house, she could hear the radiators in Stevo's mother's rooms ticking, and Mossy Mahaffey's voice going on about something, and under it, slow and flat, Arvo answering him. On her key ring, in her apron pocket, she could feel the old iron key lying against the house key to Caledonia Street, heavier than all the others, opening nothing. She kept her hand on it a moment. Then she went down the counter with the pot, because there were men waiting, and it was a weekday in Butte, and the coffee was forty cents.