Next time bring a picture of the crabapple. Grandma wants to see if it's the kind with pink flowers. If you forget, I'll remind you. — L. K.
He read it twice, the way he had the first one.
Then he folded it up along its creases and put it in his shirt pocket, and buttoned the pocket, and put his hand flat over it for a moment, the way men put a hand over their hearts in the movies, though he did not mean it that way, or did not think he did.
"It is," he said. "The kind with pink flowers. But I'll bring the picture so she can see."
"Okay," said Ludie, and then, because she was ten and could not help it, "Promise?"
He looked at Daria, over the girl's head. Daria looked back at him, steady and gray-eyed and not forgiving anything, and not refusing anything either, and after a moment she gave him the smallest nod he had ever seen, a nod so slight it might have been the wind.
"I'll be there," he said to Ludie. "Third Tuesday. If your mom still says so when it comes."
He did not say promise. He had stopped saying it a long time ago, in a place eleven miles south of here, when a counselor named Marv Lightfeather had told him that a promise was a thing you said with your mouth, and a man like him had to say things with the road. He thought Ludie understood that, a little. She nodded as if he had said it anyway.
He started the Road King. It caught on the second try, as it always did when it was cold, and settled into its low uneven rumble, and Ludie put her hands over her ears and grinned. Daria put a hand on her daughter's shoulder and drew her back a step.
He rode out of the Chevron lot and turned west onto Aultman Street, toward Highway 50 and the long gray miles to Winnemucca, toward a crabapple tree behind a metal building that he would need to photograph, and a widow's mower that was promised for Friday, and a meeting on Thursday night where a twenty-two-year-old would be waiting to see if he showed. At the edge of town he glanced in the mirror. The pink jacket was still there, small and bright in the cold morning, standing by the pumps beside a woman in a green fleece. The woman had not raised her hand. The girl had raised both of hers, and was waving them back and forth over her head as if he might not otherwise see her.
He saw her. He lifted two fingers off the grip, the way riders do for each other on long roads, and kept them up until the road curved and the town was gone.
He did not know what Daria would do with the boxes. He did not know whether Ondine would know his face in October, or whether she would have to read it in her notebook first, in a child's round hand and his own square capitals, before she let him sit down. He did not know whether there would be a November. He knew only that there was a Tuesday on the calendar where there had never been one before, and a picture he had to take, and that for the first time in thirty-three years he was not riding away from Ely. He was riding toward the next time he would come back.