"It's Helena. It's my middle name. Ellen Helena Brandt. I was Ellen Coombs for about three years in Sacramento, until I wasn't. I started going by Lena when I came out here. I didn't want — I didn't want anyone in Iowa looking for an Ellen and finding me." She paused. "Not that anyone was looking."
"Your mother was."
"Mama always knew where I was."
"I know that now."
"Jimmy too. Since he was fifteen. He wrote me from the farm. Pen pals." She smiled a little, not happily. "He used to send me the box scores from the Atlantic Trojans games. Like I cared about football."
"He circled this place on the map," Walt said. "Twice."
"I told him not to." Her arms were folded. "I told him I wasn't ready. He called me in September and said, Ellen, the bank's taken the farm and Pop's bringing Jo out on 80 in November, he's going to drive right by you, and I said, Don't you dare. And then I called him back two days later and said, Okay. But don't tell him. I want to see him first. I want to see him when he doesn't know it's me."
"Why?"
She looked at him. And there it was, the question he had seen in her face at the booth the day before, when she set down the hot beef sandwich and stood waiting.
"Because I wanted to know if you'd changed," she said. "I wanted to know if a stranger could feed you. Just a stranger. A waitress you'd never see again. If you could let somebody you didn't owe anything to put a plate in front of you, when you were hungry, and just — eat it." Her voice wavered and she steadied it. "Because if you couldn't do that, Daddy, you'd never in this world let me."
Behind her, in the kitchen, Josie was rolling the crust with enormous concentration, her tongue between her teeth, pretending with all her seven-year-old might that she could not hear a single word.
"I almost didn't eat it," Walt said.
"I saw."
"I said we didn't need charity."
"I heard you." She almost laughed. "God, I heard you. It was like a recording. I could have said it with you."