Tom Calloway had been riding for six hours across the middle of Nevada when he saw the sign for the Silver Sage Diner, and by then he would have stopped for anything with a roof.
Highway 50 runs across the state like a crease in a map, three hundred miles of two-lane blacktop through a country of sagebrush and salt flats and mountain ranges that rise up out of the desert one after another, gray and brown and purple, like the backs of sleeping animals.
Somebody had named it the Loneliest Road in America back in the eighties, and the state had liked the name so much it had printed it on souvenir passports.
Tom had a passport in his saddlebag, half stamped. He had not meant to collect the stamps. He had not meant to do much of anything on this trip except ride until something in his chest stopped hurting, and so far, after nine days and two thousand miles, nothing had.
He was fifty-four years old. He had spent twenty-two of those years in the Army, mostly as a mechanic, and another nine running a motorcycle repair shop in Grand Junction, Colorado, which he had sold in March to a young man with sleeve tattoos and big ideas. The bike under him was the one thing he had kept: a 2009 Road King he had rebuilt from a wreck, piece by piece, over three winters, painted a deep metallic blue his late wife had picked out of a catalog and called midnight lake. Carol had died four years ago, of the kind of cancer that gives you eleven months to understand what is happening. Their daughter, Molly, had not spoken to him in three.
That was the thing in his chest. That was what he was riding away from, or toward; he honestly did not know which. Molly lived in Sacramento now, with a husband Tom had met twice and a little boy Tom had never met at all. His grandson was two years old. His name was Carter. Tom knew this because Carol's sister sent him photographs at Christmas, and he kept them in his wallet, behind his driver's license, where nobody could see them but him.
He had told himself he was riding to the ocean. He had told himself a lot of things.
The Silver Sage sat by itself on a long straight stretch of highway about twenty miles east of a town called Eureka, with nothing around it but a gravel parking lot and a gas pump that looked like it had stopped working during the first Bush administration and a single cottonwood tree, enormous and half dead, throwing a ragged circle of shade. The diner itself was a long low building of corrugated metal painted a color that had once been white, with a hand-lettered sign on the roof and a row of windows along the front that looked out over