He looked at her. It took him a moment. "Round the side," he said. "By the tank. I pulled round to sleep in it. I didn't want to be in nobody's way."
From the front window you could not see the side of the building. From the parking lot you could, if you walked to the end of it and looked. Thane never walked to the end of it. Thane parked in the same spot every night and walked the same nine steps to the door.
Coralee could hear his boots on the gravel. Five, six.
She did not decide. She would say that to her sponsor later, in Fallon, and to herself a great many times, and it was true and not true. She did not decide, but her mouth opened, and what came out of it was, "The ladies' room's straight back past the register. Take her in there and wash her hands. Take your time."
He was up and moving before she finished, Dovie scooped out of the booth against his chest like a sack of flour, her red boots dangling, and he went past the register in four long strides and the door of the ladies' room swung shut behind him exactly as the front door opened and the bell over it rang.
"Coralee."
"Thane."
He was a big slow man of fifty-some, heavy in the belly and the jowls, with a white Stetson that he took off as he came in and held against his chest out of an old-fashioned courtesy that Coralee had never once seen him forget. He had the kind of face that looked sleepy and wasn't. He sat at the counter on his usual stool, the third from the end, and set the Stetson upside down on the stool beside him, and Coralee poured his coffee and got his cinnamon roll out of the case under the counter and put it on the grill to warm, and her hands did all of it without her, the way they would have poured a drink.
He looked at her over the cup. Thane Stamper had arrested her once, in May of 1979, at the Shell station on Fifth Street, for driving the wrong way around the pumps with an open can of Coors between her knees at four in the afternoon, and he had taken her home instead of to jail because Rory was in the car, home to the rented house on Sixth Street where she and Lamar lived the two years Lamar worked at the depot, and had sat in her kitchen with her until Lamar got off shift, and had never once mentioned it since, not when she came to work at the Cattail, not ever. He had a way of looking at her that she had come to understand was a kind of continuing courtesy, a decision renewed every night not to remember.
She turned the cinnamon roll on the grill with a spatula. Behind her, she could hear water running in the ladies' room, the old pipes knocking.
"Anything going on out there?" she said. She had never asked him that before, in eleven hundred nights. She heard herself ask it and wished she hadn't.