"Duty calls," he said. "Tell Benicio that roll was dry."
"All right," she said.
The bell rang. The boots went nine steps across the gravel. The car door shut, and the engine turned over, and the headlights swung across the window again and went out onto 95 southbound, toward the Thorne turnoff and the heifers, and got smaller, and went away.
Coralee stood behind the counter with her hand flat on the Formica. The clock over the pie case said two-forty-one.
It was the hour. It was the exact hour, and she had no pie, and her heart was going like a hammer on a tin roof, and from somewhere very far down and very old a voice she had not heard in a long time, a reasonable and friendly voice, said that the El Capitan downtown had a bar that stayed open all night, and it was only a mile and a half, and nobody would ever have to know.
She put her thumb on the coin and held it there until her thumb hurt.
Then she went back and knocked on the ladies' room door.
He opened it after the second knock. He had Dovie on his hip, her head on his shoulder, her eyes shut, and she was asleep, or so near it that it made no difference. He had washed her face. There was still a little meringue in one eyebrow. He looked at Coralee over the girl's head, and she saw that he had heard all of it, every word, through the thin door, and that he had been standing in the ladies' room at the Cattail Cafe with his granddaughter in his arms waiting to find out what kind of person she was.
"He's gone," she said.
"I heard."
"He's coming back. Not tonight, maybe. But he's going to drive down to the Thorne turnoff and help Jim Lekumberry's boy chase heifers, and then he's going to drive back up this road, and he goes slow, and he looks at things. That's his whole job, looking at things."