"The sign said pie."
Another silence. Then, unbelievably, a kind of laugh, wet and wrecked. "She can read pie. She's real proud of that." And then the laugh broke and became something else, and Coralee stood at the pay phone with her eyes shut and listened to a woman she had never met cry a hundred and thirty miles away, and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that would have been any use, and because she remembered that what she had wanted most in the world, in the first hundred days, was for somebody to let her cry without telling her it would be all right.
When it slowed down, Coralee said, "Jolynn. Have you had anything tonight?"
She asked it plainly, the way you would ask about a fever. The other end went still.
"No," Jolynn said. "No. I wanted to. I wanted to so bad. I went and stood outside the Club Cal-Neva at nine o'clock and looked in the door. Marcelline come and got me. I been at her place since. We been sitting here by the phone drinking Sanka. I've had about nine hundred cups of Sanka." A breath. "How'd you know to ask me that?"
"Because I'd have wanted to too," Coralee said. "I've got three years."
"Three years," Jolynn said, the way her father had said it, as if Coralee had named a country on the other side of the world.
"You come get her," Coralee said. "Cattail Cafe. It's on 95, a mile and a half north of Hawthorne, right on the lake. You can't miss it. There's a big sign with a pie on it."
"I don't have a license. I don't have—Marcelline'll drive me. Marcelline, she says—she's getting her keys. Two hours. Maybe two and a half, she drives like an old lady. Don't let him—please. Please don't let him leave with her."
Coralee turned her head to look at the back booth again.