He pulled in and shut the engine off. It ticked and hissed. The steam rose and was taken by the wind.
"Is this a stop?" Josie asked, leaning over to look at the map.
"It's a stop."
"Daddy circled it twice."
"So he did."
"Are we going to eat here?"
Walt looked at the sign, and at the steam, and at the snow.
"You are," he said.
* * *
The Prairie Rose was warm and smelled of coffee and onions and fryer grease and something sweeter underneath, cinnamon or apples. A counter ran down one side with eight chrome stools upholstered in red vinyl, three of them patched with silver tape. Booths along the windows. A pie case by the register with a rotating stand inside, slowly showing off a coconut cream, a lemon meringue, a cherry with a lattice top, a pumpkin, an apple. A pay phone on the wall by the restrooms with a phone book hanging from a chain. A calendar from a Farmers Co-op showing a red Massey Ferguson in a field of wheat. And in the back corner, a Wurlitzer jukebox, its bubbling tubes lit pink and orange, playing something soft and old, a woman's voice with a crack in it.
Two truckers sat at the counter. An old man in a seed cap sat alone in a booth doing the crossword in the *North Platte Telegraph*. Behind the counter, a heavy cook with a gray crewcut and a paper hat worked the grill, and a waitress was refilling the sugar dispensers with a long steel funnel.
She looked up when the bell over the door jangled. She was somewhere in her thirties, tall, in a pink uniform dress with a white apron and white shoes, her hair dyed a dark auburn and pinned up with a pencil through it. Her name tag said *LENA*. She had a face that had been pretty once in a way that had since turned into something more interesting than pretty, lines at the corners of her mouth from smiling and lines between her eyebrows from not.
She looked at Walt for one second longer than a waitress looks at a customer. Then she looked at Josie, and smiled.
"Sit anywhere you like," she said. "It's not exactly the Ritz on a Saturday."
Walt took the booth nearest the door, out of habit. A farmer sat near the door; it was how you got out quick if you heard the hogs. Josie slid in across from him and immediately began to read the little paper placemat, which had a map of Nebraska on it and pictures of Chimney Rock and Buffalo Bill and a word search.
The waitress came with two glasses of water and two menus that were laminated and sticky at the corners. Up close Walt saw she had a small white scar across the pad of her left thumb, and that her eyes were gray. He did not look at her eyes for long. He had gotten out of the habit of looking at people's eyes. It was a thing that happened to a man when the bank came; you learned that people's eyes could hold a kind of weather you didn't want to stand in.