"I don't know," said Walt, to his granddaughter. "I think maybe she was."
Josie nodded, as though that settled something. She took the photograph from his hand, very carefully, by the edges, the way Earl had handed her the sack. She looked at it a long time in the gray light of the snowing TV.
"She has a scar," Josie said. "On her thumb. See? Where she's holding the clarinet. There's a little white line."
Walt looked. He had looked at this photograph a thousand times. He had never noticed that you could see the scar.
"She cut it on a corn knife," he said. "When she was ten."
"The lady at the diner has one too," said Josie. "Right there. I saw it when she put down my chocolate milk."
The heater roared. On the television the boat had sailed into nothing at all, just snow, white noise, a sound like the wind across a cemetery hill.
Walt Brandt sat on the peach-colored bedspread in the Lazy K Motel in Ogallala, Nebraska, and the floor of the world tilted under him, very slowly, the way a barn floor tilts in a storm when the foundation has been going for years and nobody wanted to look.
"Go to sleep, Jo," he said. His voice did not sound like his own. "Go to sleep. We'll go back for breakfast."
* * *
He did not sleep. He lay on the bed nearest the door with his boots on and listened to the heater, and to Josie breathing, and to the trucks out on 26 going by with their chains chinking on the packed snow, and he thought.
He thought that it could not be. He thought that it was a common enough name, Lena, and a common enough scar, and a common enough saying, and a common enough shade of gray for eyes. He thought that Ogallala was three hundred and sixty miles from the farm and two thousand from Sacramento and that people did not simply turn up at the exact diner off the exact exit where your car happened to die.
Then he thought: *Prairie Rose Cafe. Best pie on 80. Trust me, Pop.* Circled twice. Gone over in red ink, heavy enough to dent the paper.
Then he thought about his son's voice on the phone. *Did you meet the waitress? Did you eat it, Pop?*
And he thought about the woman at the counter, wiping the same eighteen inches of Formica with a gray rag, watching him eat.