On the night of Sunday the twentieth of November, 1983, the Cattail was quieter than it had any business being, and everybody who did come in wanted to talk about the movie. ABC had shown it at eight o'clock, two hours and some with no commercials once the bombs started falling, and it seemed as though the whole country had sat down in front of it at once, the way they had for the moon. The Day After. Coralee had not seen it. She had been driving to work. But by eleven o'clock she felt as if she had watched it twice, because every man who sat down at her counter had to tell her about it, the way men in Hawthorne told you about anything that frightened them, sideways and with a joke on the end.
"Way I figure," said Elvin Oyler from the depot's maintenance crew, stirring four sugars into his coffee, "we're the safest place in America. Russians hit Hawthorne, we don't even feel it. We're gone before the bomb lands. All them bunkers go up by themselves out of pure sympathy."
The depot was the reason Hawthorne existed, more or less, and everybody who lived there carried the knowledge of it around like a stone in a boot, something you walked on so long you only noticed it when somebody else pointed. It sprawled for miles south and east of town, a hundred and forty-some thousand acres of desert pocked with earth-covered concrete igloos, two thousand and more of them in rows as neat as a cemetery, each with its steel door and its number stenciled over the top, each one full of something the Navy or the Army had made to blow up and then decided to keep. Rory had been afraid of them when he was five. He had called them the sleeping turtles. Lamar, who was still around then and still mostly sober himself, had told him they were full of Christmas presents for soldiers, and Rory had believed it for two years.
By one o'clock the counter was empty. Benicio was in the back scraping the grill with a pumice brick and listening to KOH out of Reno on a transistor radio taped to the vent hood, a call-in program on which people were telephoning to say what they had felt, watching. Coralee went back and put the raisins on.
Coralee turned the burner under the saucepan low and stood with the wooden spoon and watched the sour cream go glossy and begin, very slowly, to move.
She was thinking, in the way she let herself think only while the custard was too thin to scorch, about Rory's last visit. Two weekends ago. Lorene had driven him down from Fallon in her Buick LeSabre and handed him over in the Cattail parking lot at nine in the morning, the way she always did, as if it were a hostage exchange at a border, and Coralee had taken him to the lake. They had skipped rocks. He was getting tall and quiet, all knees and elbows and eyelashes, with Lamar's ears and her own crooked eyetooth, and he had asked her, without looking at her, whether she was going to make him come live in the trailer. Not whether she wanted him to. Whether she was going to make him.
Coralee had said nobody was going to make him do anything, that a judge would ask what was fair. He had thrown a flat rock, a good one, and they had both counted the skips under their breath, seven, eight, nine, and then he had said, "She cries in the bathroom. She runs the water so I can't hear."
Coralee had not known what to say to that. She still didn't. Lorene Dahlquist had taken Rory in the spring of 1980, when Coralee had put the Nova into an irrigation ditch on the Harrigan Road at eleven in the morning with an eight-year-old in the back seat who had been asking her for twenty minutes to please slow down. He had come out of it with a cut over his eye that needed four stitches. She had come out of it with a broken collarbone and a blood alcohol content that the trooper had read off to her twice, once in the ambulance and once in the courtroom. Lorene had come to the hospital in her church clothes and stood at the foot of the bed and said, very quietly, "I'm going to take him home now, Coralee," and Coralee had said yes, because there wasn't anything else to say. Lorene had been right. Lorene had been right every single day since. That was the hardest part. You could fight a woman who was wrong.
The custard was ready. She drew the spoon through it and the line held. She took it off the heat and folded in the raisins and the cinnamon and the clove, less than you think, and poured it into the shell, and then she separated out the bowl of whites and started beating them by hand with the big balloon whisk, because Grandma Hutto had never owned an electric mixer and Coralee had the feeling, which she knew was not sensible, that the pie knew the difference.
She was pulling up the mountains when she heard the truck.
You learned to hear trucks at the Cattail the way people at the coast learned to hear weather. This was neither. This was something old, a six-cylinder with a lifter ticking somewhere in it like a clock, coming off the highway slow, as if the driver weren't sure he wanted to, and then the crunch of gravel, and then the engine cutting out before the truck had quite stopped, so that it rolled the last few feet in silence. A door opened. A door closed. Then, after a long time, the other door.