She took out a ham sandwich and unwrapped the wax paper, and Walt saw her hands hesitate — saw the old habit rise in her, the instinct to break it down the middle, to save half, to fold the corners in. He saw her think about it. He watched her decide.
She handed the whole sandwich across the seat to him. Then she unwrapped the other one for herself.
"Both of us," she said.
"Both of us," Walt agreed, and took it, and ate it while it was hot — or as hot as a ham sandwich ever gets, which is not very — with the Colorado line coming up ahead and Wyoming beyond it and the whole wide, empty, forgiving West opening up in front of them like a table that had been set, a long time ago, by somebody who had never stopped expecting them to come home.
* * *
The trailer was not much, as Jimmy had said, but it had two bedrooms and the heat worked, and on the Friday after Thanksgiving there were four people crowded around a folding card table in its narrow kitchen: Jimmy, still in his work boots, with trona dust in the creases of his knuckles; Josie, on two phone books; Walt, in a new flannel shirt from the Gibson's in Green River; Ellen, who had driven three hundred and seventy miles through Cheyenne and over the Laramie summit in a Datsun with no snow tires and a backseat full of pies; and, at the end of the table, an empty chair.
"Who's that for?" asked Jimmy.
"Mama," said Ellen.
"Grandma," said Josie at the same time.
"And Sarah," said Walt. "When she's ready. If she wants it."
They looked at him. He did not look away.
"There's always room for one more plate," he said. "Your mother taught me that. Took me sixty-three years to learn it."
Ellen reached over and squeezed his hand, her scarred thumb across his knuckles.
Then Jimmy carved the turkey, which was a little dry, and the pies were perfect, all but one apple with an uneven edge, which everyone agreed was the best of them because it had been made by a person; and no one at that table cut anything in half to save for later, and no one was hungry, and no one said they were fine when they weren't. Outside the window the Wyoming wind came down off the Wind River Range and threw itself against the thin aluminum walls, and inside, they ate while it was hot.
The world waited.