He put the fork down.
"Grandpa? Are you okay?"
"Fine," he said. "I'm fine. Just — full."
"You're not full. You ate half."
He looked down at his plate and saw that she was right: he had eaten exactly half. The other half sat there, the gravy beginning to skin over.
He picked the fork back up, because Josie was watching, and because the woman behind the counter was watching, and because some part of him he did not understand had begun to feel that if he did not finish this plate, something would be lost that could not be gotten back.
* * *
They had driven to Omaha on a Tuesday because Tuesdays nobody would notice the car was gone.
That was how Walt had thought about it then. He had thought about all of it like that, like a problem in logistics, a thing to be moved from one place to another without anyone seeing. It was easier than thinking about it any other way. If you thought about it as a load of hogs you had to get to the sale barn, you could get up in the morning and do it.
Ellen was seventeen. She had been a junior at Atlantic High School, first chair clarinet in the band, on the honor roll every semester since the third grade. She had a boy, or had had one, a quiet gangly kid named Dale Kerrigan whose family farmed on the other side of the Nishnabotna, and in the summer of 1967 Dale had enlisted in the Marines a week after graduation and gone off to Parris Island and from there to a place called Quang Tri, and Ellen had written him letters on blue airmail paper every day, and then in September she had stopped eating breakfast and started being sick in the mornings, and Marian, who was not a fool, had taken her to a doctor in Red Oak where nobody knew them.
Walt had been in the machine shed when Marian came out to tell him. He remembered it exactly — the smell of diesel and old grease, the radio on the workbench playing a hog-market report, the sun coming through the gaps in the siding in bright slats. He had been replacing a bearing on the corn picker. Marian had stood in the doorway with her hands knotted in her apron and told him in five sentences, and when she was done he had set down the bearing very carefully on the bench, as if it were made of glass, and then he had picked up a ball-peen hammer and thrown it through the shed's one window.
He had never struck his wife. He had never struck either of his children past a swat on the seat when they were small. But he had thrown that hammer through that window, and the glass had come down in a bright rain on the gravel outside, and Marian had not flinched, and he had understood in that moment that she had already decided whose side she was on, and it was not his.
That was the first thing.
The second thing was the conversation at the kitchen table that night, which went on until two in the morning, and in which Walt said things he would spend the next eighteen years hearing in the dark. Things about the church, and the town, and what people would say, and what the Kerrigans would say, and what kind of girl. That was the phrase he kept coming back to, though he never finished it. *What kind of girl.* Ellen sat across from him with her hands flat on the oilcloth and did not cry, which was worse than crying. Jimmy, who was eleven, listened from the top of the stairs; Walt found out years later he had been there the whole time.
The third thing was Dale Kerrigan's mother calling on the twelfth of October to say that Dale had been killed near a place called Con Thien.
And the fourth thing was the Tuesday.