At the jukebox, she had played "Crazy" three times. Ellen told her it had been her own favorite song when she was in high school, that she'd worn out the 45 on the record player in the farmhouse parlor, and that Grandpa used to yell up the stairs that if he heard that woman go to pieces one more time he would go to pieces himself.
"Did you?" Josie asked him.
"Constantly," said Walt.
That night they did not go back to the Lazy K. Walt walked over in the dark and paid Bev for the room he'd already used and gathered their two small bags, and Ellen drove them out past the fairgrounds in her blue Datsun with a cracked dashboard and a Patsy Cline cassette stuck permanently in the deck, to a single-wide trailer with a porch made of pallets and a string of Christmas lights already up along the eaves, though it was not yet Thanksgiving. The cat's name was Clarinet. He did not bother anyone, except about tuna.
Ellen made supper. Chicken and noodles, the Iowa kind, thick egg noodles cut by hand on a floured board, ladled over mashed potatoes, which was a thing no one outside of four or five Midwestern counties had ever heard of, and which Walt had not eaten since Marian's last Christmas. She set the little table in the trailer's kitchen with three plates. Three. Mismatched — one Corelle with green vines, one from a Texaco promotion, one plain white diner plate she had liberated from the Prairie Rose — and she filled them all the way to the rim.
Josie looked at her plate. Then she looked at her grandfather's. Then she looked at Ellen's.
"Everybody has a whole one," she said.
"That's right," said Ellen.
"Nobody has to have half."
"Not in this house."
Josie nodded slowly. Then she reached into the pocket of her red parka, which was hanging on the back of her chair, and took out something folded in a paper napkin — the triangle of grilled cheese from Saturday morning, a day and a half old, stiff as a shingle, its corners still tucked in like a letter — and set it in the middle of the table.
"I don't need this anymore," she said.
Nobody laughed. Walt looked at the little napkin bundle in the middle of the table, under the kitchen light, among the three full plates, and he thought it was the saddest and most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he thought that his granddaughter had carried it three hundred and sixty miles on his account, and that his daughter had once carried one just like it to Omaha, and that he had been the reason for both.
"Thank you, Jo," he said.
"You're welcome." She picked up her fork. "Can we eat now? It's getting cold."