After a while she wrapped the half-sandwich back up in its wax paper, folding the corners over carefully like the flap on an envelope, and set it on the seat between them, and there it stayed the whole way to Omaha. Neither of them touched it. Neither of them ate anything at all.
* * *
They stopped once, at a diner on the edge of Council Bluffs, because Ellen needed the restroom. Red-and-black diamond linoleum. A counter with a pie case. Walt sat in the car with the engine running and watched the door, and when she came out she was walking very straight and her eyes were red, and a waitress was standing in the doorway behind her, an older woman, gray-haired, watching her go.
The waitress came across the lot. She came all the way to Walt's window and he rolled it down two inches.
"Your girl's welcome to come in and sit a while," the waitress said. "Have a bowl of soup. On me. She looks like she could use it."
"We're fine," Walt said.
"I've got a daughter," the waitress said. "I know what fine looks like. That's not it."
"We have a lunch," Walt said, and rolled the window back up.
He would remember that more than almost anything. More than the building with the cupola. More than the nurse with the clipboard. More than the sound Ellen's suitcase made on the stone steps, a little hollow knock, as she carried it up herself because he had not gotten out of the car to carry it for her. He would remember the gray-haired waitress standing in the lot in her apron with the wind pulling at her skirt, offering a bowl of soup to a girl in trouble, and himself rolling up the window in her face.
*We have a lunch.*
And the half-sandwich in its wax paper on the car seat, which he found when he got back to the farm that night, still folded, still there. He had sat in the dark in the yard holding it for a long time. Then he had thrown it to the dog.
* * *
He finished the plate. He finished it down to the last smear of gravy, which he took up with the last corner of bread, the way his mother had taught him to do in 1931 when nothing was wasted, and when he set the fork down on the empty plate Josie gave a small sigh like a woman setting down a heavy bag.
"Good," she said.
"Good," Walt agreed.