Somewhere around four in the morning he got up and went outside in his coat and stood in the motel parking lot in the snow, which had stopped falling, under a sky that had cleared to a hard black full of stars. The cold went into him like nails. He stood there until he could not feel his hands, and he said aloud, to nobody, to the stars, to Marian, "I don't know how to do this."
Nobody answered. He had not expected anyone to. But he found that saying it out loud had made it a smaller thing, a thing about the size of a man, instead of the size of the sky.
* * *
The Prairie Rose opened at seven on Sundays for the church crowd. Walt and Josie walked over at a quarter past eight, along the plowed shoulder of Highway 26 with the sun just up and the snow so bright it hurt, Josie in her red parka holding his hand and swinging the empty white sack from Earl.
The diner was half full. Farm families in their church clothes, the men in pressed jeans and bolo ties, the women in polyester pantsuits, the children in snowsuits sliding around the booths. The jukebox was playing Alabama. Earl was at the grill, flipping pancakes four at a time. And behind the counter, in a pink uniform with a pencil through her hair, the waitress named Lena was pouring coffee for a table of six, laughing at something one of the men had said, and when the bell over the door jangled she looked up, and saw them, and the coffee went over the rim of the cup and onto the saucer.
"Shoot," she said. "Sorry, Harold. Sorry."
She mopped it up. She did not look at the door again for a long moment. Then she did, and her face was composed, and she came toward them with two menus.
"Morning," she said. "You survived the Lazy K."
"We did," said Walt.
"Bev treat you right?"
"Gave Jo Tootsie Rolls."
"That's Bev. Sit anywhere."
They sat in the same booth. She brought coffee and chocolate milk without asking. Walt watched her hands. He watched them the way he had once watched the sky in August, for the one cloud that meant hail. He watched her set down the cup and saucer, the left hand steadying the right, and there on the pad of the thumb was the thin white line, a little crooked, the shape of a corn knife's hook.
Butterfly stitches. Marian's hands. His own handkerchief, red, tied tight. A ten-year-old girl on the kitchen counter, biting her lip, saying, *It's okay, Daddy, it doesn't even hurt*, while the blood came through the cloth.
"What can I get you?" the waitress said.