"Yes."
"You know where the Haskett place is? Out past the cattle guard on Lamoille Road, with the blue metal shop?"
Everybody knew where it was. People slowed down and sped up past it.
"I'll have the parts by Saturday," Boone said. "You want to finish the job, you come out. Ten in the morning. I'll pay you for that too." He pulled on a pair of sunglasses. "Or don't. Up to you."
He let out the clutch and rumbled off up Railroad Street, and the sound of him rolled back off the grain elevator and the brick front of the old Commercial Hotel and the far blue wall of the Ruby Mountains, and was gone.
Josie stood by the flagpole with her heart going like a kicked can. Then she looked at her watch, which was a man's watch, steel and too big for her wrist, and saw that it was 2:41, and she got on her bicycle and rode home so fast the pharmacy bag bounced right out of the crate at the corner of Fifth and Pine, and she had to go back for it.
* * *
The house on Pine Street had been built by the railroad in 1912 for a section foreman, and it still had the foreman's iron boot scraper by the front step. Josie leaned her bicycle against the porch rail and went in quiet, the way she always did, listening.
The television was on. That was good. A man on the television was selling a knife that could cut through a shoe.
"Aitona?"
"In here, Kristin."
Her grandfather sat in his recliner by the window in a clean blue work shirt buttoned to the throat, with his hands folded on his stomach and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He was a small, wiry man, brown as a saddle, with white hair that stood up in back no matter what you did to it. He had been born in a sheep camp above Jiggs in 1948, to a father who had come over from the Pyrenees to herd for a rancher and stayed, and he had a way of sitting very still, like a man who'd spent his boyhood watching a hillside for coyotes.
"It's Josie," Josie said, coming around the chair so he could see her. "Kristin's my mom."