They looked at each other. The heater ticked. Out on the highway a truck downshifted with a long groan.
"You eat it," Walt said, more gently than he meant to and less gently than he wanted. "Please."
She held it out a moment longer. Then she wrapped it back up, slowly and precisely, folding the napkin corners over like a letter, and put it back in her pocket. She did not say anything. She pressed PLAY on the tape recorder, and a voice was singing about the number seven, and she let it play all the way through for the first time that day.
Walt pulled back onto the interstate. He thought, for no reason he could name, of a piece of wax paper on a car seat, folded just like that. He thought of it the way you feel a draft in a house you thought was sealed. Then he put it away and drove.
* * *
By three in the afternoon the first snow was coming sideways across the road in thin white ropes, and the temperature needle was standing up straight like a man who has heard his name called.
Walt watched it climb and did the arithmetic again. Lexington was behind them. North Platte was behind them. The next town of any size was Ogallala, twenty miles on, and after that a long empty stretch to Big Springs and the Colorado line. He took the car down to forty-five and then to forty and turned the heater all the way up, which was an old trick to pull heat off the engine, and the cabin filled with a thick dry warmth that smelled of dust and antifreeze.
"It's hot," said Josie, taking off her parka.
"I know it."
"Why is it so hot?"
"Car's tired."
"Is it going to break?"
"No," Walt said. "It's going to rest."
Jimmy's map lay open on the seat between them, held down by the tape recorder. Jimmy had drawn red circles at intervals all along I-80, with notes in his tilted, hurried hand. *Gas cheap here.* *Clean bathrooms.* *Motel 6, $21.95, don't stay at the one next to it.* At Ogallala the circle was drawn heavier, gone over twice, and beside it Jimmy had written, *Prairie Rose Cafe, off 30 by the grain elevator. Best pie on 80. Trust me, Pop.*
Walt had smiled at that when he first read it, at the kitchen table, before the auction. Jimmy had never been west of Lincoln before August. He had not known that his son was a connoisseur of pie.
They came down the exit ramp into Ogallala with steam beginning to lift in feathers from under the hood. Walt let the car roll along the frontage road past a Conoco and a Dairy Queen closed for the season and a sign that said *OGALLALA — COWBOY CAPITAL — FRONT STREET BOOT HILL*, and then the grain elevator rose up on the left, white and enormous, and at its feet, in a gravel lot with three pickups and a Peterbilt cab, was a low building with a neon sign in the window shaped like a rose, half its petals burnt out, so that it read, in pink cursive, *rairie Ro e*.