He didn't answer. He sat with his hand on the girl's hair and his eyes shut, and Coralee reached over and turned the key, and the old engine coughed and ticked and went quiet, and the heater fan wound down, and the silence of the desert came in through the glass like water into a hold.
"When I said you remind me of her," he said, after a while, without opening his eyes. "I didn't mean the coin. Not only. I seen the coin after."
"What did you mean?"
He was quiet so long she thought he wasn't going to tell her.
"Winter of 'sixty-eight," he said. "She was ten. Jolynn. I'd drunk up the pay. All of it, in two nights, at the Bank Club and then at a card game behind the depot in Ely, and I come home Sunday and there wasn't nothing in the house. Not flour, hardly. Not eggs. Some lard and some sugar and a bottle of vinegar and a half a can of nutmeg that'd been Vada's. And I come in and my girl had made a pie out of it. Vinegar pie. Out of nothing. Her mother made it in the Depression, when she was a girl, and Jolynn found the card in the box, the recipe card, in her mama's writing, and she done it all herself at ten years old, standing on a chair. And she set it on the table in front of me." He opened his eyes. They were wet. "And she was so scared I'd be mad she'd used the sugar. And she took a fork and she ate the first bite herself. The point. Standing up. So I'd know it was all right. So I'd know it was good and I could have some and it wouldn't cost nothing." He looked at Coralee. "Just like you done. In there. With your pie. You stood up and you ate the point."
Coralee could not say anything.
"And I didn't eat it," he said. "That's the thing. That's what I been thinking about the whole nine hours on this road, since Fallon, since before. I didn't eat it. I was sick and I was ashamed and I went in the bedroom and shut the door. And in the morning it was gone. She'd throwed it out. And I never said a word to her about it. Not that day and not in fifteen years. I never once told her it was good." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, roughly, the way a man wipes off sweat. "I don't know if it was good. I never tasted it. But I should've told her."
They sat there. The girl breathed.
"You can still tell her," she said.
"It's too late for that."