the parking lot to the road and the empty desert beyond. There were three vehicles in the lot: a dusty gray pickup with a camper shell, parked at the far end by the cottonwood; an old Buick that probably belonged to someone who worked there; and a semi idling on the shoulder with its driver asleep in the cab.
Tom parked the Road King in front of the windows where he could see it, as he always did, and pulled off his helmet and sat for a moment in the heat, letting the road ring out of his ears. It was a quarter past two in the afternoon in late September. The sky was hard blue. The heat came up off the gravel in waves.
He went inside.
It was cooler in the diner, though not by much. A window unit rattled above the door. There was a long counter with red vinyl stools, half of them patched with duct tape, and a row of booths along the windows, and a pass-through to the kitchen where a man in a stained white T-shirt was scraping down the flat-top grill. The radio was playing country music from a station that faded in and out. On the wall behind the register hung a framed dollar bill, a calendar from a feed store in Ely, and a hand-lettered sign that said WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE, and underneath it, in smaller letters, someone had added, ESPECIALLY CALIFORNIANS.
There were no other customers.
A girl came out from behind the counter with a menu. She could not have been older than sixteen. She was small and thin, with a long brown braid down her back and a sunburned nose and a waitress apron tied twice around her narrow waist, and she had the guarded, watchful look of somebody who had learned early to read a room before she walked into it. Her name tag said WREN.
"Sit anywhere," she said. "It's not exactly a rush."
"I see that." Tom took the booth by the window, the one with the clearest view of his bike, and slid in with a grunt. His knees had opinions about six hours in the saddle. "That's a pretty name. Wren."
"It's a bird."
"I know it's a bird. Little brown thing. Sings loud for its size."
She looked at him then, really looked, for the first time, and something in her face shifted a fraction, the way a door shifts in a draft. "My mom picked it," she said. "She liked birds." And then, as if she had said too much, she put the menu down in front of him and said, "The special's chicken-fried steak. The pie's peach. It's from the store, but it's okay. You want coffee?"
"I'd kill for coffee."
"I'll get it."