"What made you — you didn't go away. When I said it. You stood there."
"Josie," she said simply. "She put that sandwich half down next to your coffee cup. Wrapped up in a napkin, corners folded in. And I thought, I know that. I did that. I did exactly that, in the car, on the way to Omaha. And I thought, he's going to do it to her too. He's going to let her carry it around all the way to Wyoming. And I couldn't stand it." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and left a streak of flour on her cheekbone. "So I stood there. I figured I'd stand there till you ate it or Earl fired me."
* * *
They sat in the back booth, the one by the jukebox, after the pies were in the oven — two apple and a pumpkin, Josie's crimping a little uneven along one edge, which Ellen said was how you could tell a pie was made by a person instead of a factory. Josie had been given a stack of quarters and permission to play anything she wanted on the Wurlitzer, and was standing in front of it reading every title with the solemnity of a judge.
Walt had his hands flat on the Formica. He found he could not stop looking at his daughter's face. He kept losing her and finding her in it, the girl and the woman, like a radio station fading in and out on a long night drive.
"I burned your letter," he said.
It was the first thing. He had decided in the motel parking lot under the stars that if it ever came to this, it would be the first thing, because it was the worst thing, and you dug out the worst rock first or the plow would always catch on it.
Ellen nodded slowly. "I figured. I figured you either burned it or you read it and decided no."
"I didn't read it. I want you to know that. I didn't read it and decide no. I was a coward, and I put it in the cookstove without opening it, and I stood there and watched it go. That's what I did."
"I don't know which is worse."
"Neither do I."
The jukebox clicked. Josie had chosen something; the record dropped, and a man's voice began, slow and plain, singing about a long black train.
"Do you want to know what it said?" Ellen asked.
"Yes."
She looked out the window at the white lot and the grain elevator.