The diner in the Chevron was not really a diner. It was six vinyl booths and a counter along the back wall of the convenience store, between the beef jerky and the restrooms, run by a heavyset Basque woman in her sixties who made chorizo-and-egg burritos and a green chili that men drove in from Lund for. Bonner had eaten there exactly once before, five weeks ago, in his imagination, on every one of the three hundred and twenty miles he had just ridden. He had pictured himself sitting in a booth afterward. After seeing her. Eating a bowl of green chili and looking out the window at the hospital and trying to understand whatever had just happened to him.
Now he sat in the booth before, or instead, and ordered coffee, and did not drink it.
He took out his phone, an old flip phone with a cracked hinge that he kept because the buttons were large enough for his fingers, and he called a man in Winnemucca named Hector Ruelas, who was fifty-four and had been sober for nine years and whom Bonner had sponsored for all nine of them.
"Did you see her?" Hector said, instead of hello.
"No."
"She say no?"
"Her daughter did."
Hector was quiet. Then, "You okay?"
"I'm sitting in a gas station drinking coffee."
"Are you drinking coffee?"
Bonner looked at the cup. "No."
"Drink the coffee, viejo. Then tell me."
So he drank the coffee and told him, all of it, the note and the notebook and the girl in the pink jacket and the eleven shoeboxes. Hector listened without interrupting, which was the thing Bonner had spent nine years teaching him and which he had, finally, learned.