"I got a letter in August. From the Crittenton office in Omaha. Forwarded from my old address in Sacramento, which took about three months, of course." She took a breath. "There's a girl. She'll be eighteen in March. Her name is Sarah. She lives in Lincoln. She's a senior in high school, and she plays the flute, and she wants to meet me. After her birthday. Her parents said it's all right."
Walt could not speak.
"I didn't know if I'd tell you," Ellen said. "I didn't know if you'd want to know."
"I want to know," he said. "I want to know everything. I want to know what she looks like. I want to know if she's got your eyes." He stopped. "I want to know if she'd ever — if there's any chance, someday, she'd want to meet a foolish old man who —"
"Let's take it one plate at a time, Daddy," said Ellen gently.
He nodded. That seemed right. That seemed like the only way anyone ever did anything.
* * *
They left for Wyoming at one o'clock. Ellen could not come; Earl needed her through the holiday, and Hector's wife was having a baby, and the Prairie Rose was the only place in Ogallala that served Thanksgiving dinner to truckers and widowers and anyone else who had nowhere to be. But she would drive out to Rock Springs on the Friday after, she said, in the Datsun, with the rest of the pies. And she would call. She would call every Sunday night at seven, after close, from the pay phone by the restrooms, and Walt said he would be standing by the phone in the bunkhouse at a quarter till.
She packed them a lunch. Two ham sandwiches, whole, in wax paper. Two apples. Two slices of the pumpkin pie. A thermos of coffee. A carton of chocolate milk. She put it in a white paper sack and handed it to Josie, and then she knelt down in the gravel in her white waitress shoes and hugged her niece so hard that Josie said "oof," and then she stood up and hugged her father, and he held on, and she let him.
"Eat the whole thing," she said into his coat.
"I will."
"I mean it. I'll ask Jimmy."
"You'll ask Jo," said Walt. "She's the one who keeps track."
He got into the car. Josie climbed onto her folded quilt. The Ford started on the first try, which it had not done since Carter was president. Walt backed out of the space and pulled toward the frontage road, and this time he got forty feet, and four hundred, and four miles, and in the rearview mirror he watched the neon rose go small in the window, *rairie Ro e*, and the tall woman in the pink uniform standing in the lot with her hand raised, not waving, just raised, the way you hold your hand up to the sun, until the grain elevator was a white thumb on the horizon and then it was gone.
West of Big Springs, Josie opened the paper sack.