She went back behind the counter. Tom opened the menu and did not read it. He looked out the window at the Road King sitting in the sun, and at the empty highway shimmering in the heat, and at the gray pickup with the camper shell parked under the cottonwood at the far end of the lot. There was someone in the pickup. He could see the shape of a head behind the windshield, and the glow of a phone screen. Somebody waiting out the heat, he supposed. Somebody with nowhere better to be.
Behind the counter, the man from the kitchen had come out through the swinging door. He was in his forties, tall and soft-bellied, with thinning hair combed straight back and a wide pleasant face and small pale eyes. He was wiping his hands on a towel. He said something to the girl in a low voice, and she said something back, and he shook his head, smiling, and took the coffeepot out of her hand.
"I got it, sweetheart," Tom heard him say. "You go roll silverware."
The girl stood still for a second. Then she went to the far end of the counter and began rolling knives and forks into paper napkins from a big plastic tub, her head down, her braid falling over her shoulder.
The man took a heavy white mug from the rack. He turned his back to the room for a moment, toward the coffee station, where there was a sugar caddy and a basket of creamers and a row of steel canisters. Tom heard the clink of a spoon. Then the man turned around, smiling, with the full mug in one hand and the pot in the other, and came out from behind the counter and across the diner to Tom's booth.
"Afternoon," he said. "Curtis. I own the place. Saw that bike pull in. That's a real nice Road King. You do that paint yourself?"
"Had it done," Tom said. "My wife picked the color."
"She's got good taste." Curtis set the mug down in front of him, steaming, black as tar. "That's on the house. Anybody who rides Fifty in this heat deserves a free cup. Where you headed?"
"West. Ocean, eventually."
"Long way yet. Long empty way." Curtis's small pale eyes went out the window, to the bike, and lingered there a moment, and came back. "You riding alone?"
"Just me."
"Well, you take it easy out there. Next gas is Austin, seventy miles, and there ain't a thing between here and there but jackrabbits. Lot of folks get drowsy on that stretch. Heat does it. You get to feeling sleepy, you pull over, you hear? There's a rest area about thirty miles on. Nice and shady. Good place to close your eyes." He smiled again. "Let Wren know what you want to eat."
He went back behind the counter and through the swinging door into the kitchen. Tom heard the scrape of the spatula start up again on the grill.
Tom looked at the coffee.
It smelled like coffee. It looked like coffee. He was tired and hot and his head was beginning to ache from the sun, and he wanted it more than he had wanted anything in a long time. He wrapped his hand around the mug. It was almost too hot to hold. He lifted it.