"It said I was sorry. That's the stupid thing. *I* was sorry. I said I was sorry I'd embarrassed you in front of the church. I said I was working at a cannery in Sacramento and I had a room in a boardinghouse and I was taking classes at night at the junior college. I said I'd been to the Crittenton office in Omaha before I left and signed a paper saying that if she ever wanted to find me, she could, and I asked you — I asked you, if a letter ever came for me at the farm from a girl I didn't know, not to throw it away." She stopped. "And I said I'd come home at Christmas if you wanted me. And I said you didn't have to write anything long. Just one word. Just *yes*. On a postcard. And I'd be on the bus."
Walt closed his eyes.
"I watched the mailbox till March," said Ellen. "Then I married Rick Coombs, which was a mistake, and that was that."
* * *
For a long time neither of them said anything. The man on the jukebox sang. Earl came in from the back and checked the pies through the oven window and went out again without a word.
"Your mother," Walt said finally. "She came to see you."
"Twice. In '76 and in '80. Took the bus. Told you she was visiting Aunt Doris in Lincoln. The second time she came here, to Ogallala. I'd just moved. I picked this town because it was halfway — far enough from Atlantic that nobody would ever wander in, close enough Mama could get here on one Trailways ticket." She smiled, and this time it was nearly happy. "She sat right where you're sitting. She ordered the hot beef. She told Earl his gravy needed more pepper and he's been mad about it for five years."
"That sounds like her."
"She told me you were sorry," said Ellen. "She said you'd never say it, but you were. She said you had my school picture in your wallet behind hers. I didn't believe her."
Walt took out his wallet. He took out the photograph of Marian at the State Fair, laughing with her corn dog, and behind it the school picture, soft at the corners, and he set it on the table between them and turned it around so that it faced her.
Ellen looked at it for a long time. She touched the edge with one floured fingertip. She was crying now, openly, and so was he, an old man in a 1971 coat in a closed diner in the Nebraska panhandle with the shades pulled down, crying in front of his daughter for the first time in his life.
"I was at the funeral," she said.
"Under the cedar tree."
She looked up sharply. "You saw me?"
"I saw a woman. I didn't let myself see you." He wiped his face with his palm. "Jimmy saw you. He went out after. In the church hall."