"He walked me to my car. I'd driven all night. I couldn't — I couldn't come down the hill, Daddy. I stood up there and I thought, if I go down there and he turns his back on me in front of Mama's grave, I'll die. I'll just lie down on the grass and die. So I didn't go."
"I wouldn't have turned my back."
"You don't know that."
He thought about it honestly, because she deserved honesty, because eighteen years of the other thing had bought them nothing.
"No," he said. "I don't know that. Not in 1983. I would like to think I wouldn't have. But the man who threw that hammer through the shed window was still in there, and I don't know what he'd have done." He looked at her. "I know what I'd do now."
"What's different now?"
He opened his hands on the table. They were big hands, farmer's hands, scarred and knuckly, and empty.
"I lost everything," he said. "The land, the house, the machinery, the hogs. Your mother. Everything my granddad broke out of that prairie with a team of horses. It's all gone, Ellen. A man with a microphone sold it in an afternoon. And yesterday I sat in that booth with thirty-five dollars to my name and a seven-year-old who's been carrying half her food around in her pocket for a week because she's scared I'm going to starve, and a stranger put a plate in front of me." He swallowed. "And I found out that all the things I was too proud to take, all those years — I didn't have a single thing left to be proud of. It was just me and a plate of food and a little girl watching. That's all that was left. That's all that was ever really there."
Ellen reached across the table. She put her hand over his, the left hand, and he felt the small rough line of the scar on her thumb against his knuckle.
"I'm sorry," Walt said. "I am sorry. I am sorry I sent you to that place by yourself, and I'm sorry I didn't carry your suitcase up the steps, and I'm sorry I didn't eat your sandwich, and I'm sorry I rolled the window up on that woman in Council Bluffs. And I'm sorry about the letter. I'm sorry for every day you watched that mailbox. I'd give the whole farm back to the bank twice over to have written you one word."
"Yes," said Ellen.
He did not understand.
"That's the word," she said, and her voice broke all the way. "That's the word I wanted. You just said it. You can stop now, Daddy. You can stop."
* * *
The pies came out at four. Ellen let Josie choose which one was hers to take to Wyoming, and Josie chose the apple with the uneven crimping, because, she said, it was the one that was made by a person.