"Quieter," Coralee said. "It gets quieter. You can hear other things over it."
At a quarter to seven the brown station wagon pulled out onto 95 northbound with Dovie's face in the back window, and behind it, slow, the old white-over-green Ford with a full tank, and Coralee stood in the gravel without her coat and watched the two of them grow small along the edge of the lake until the road bent at the point and took them.
Benicio sent her home at seven. She did not go home. She sat in the Nova in the lot with the engine running and the heater going and looked at the lake for a while, and then she pulled out and turned north herself, past the sign with the steaming pie, past Walker Lake village and the long empty shore, up through Schurz and the cottonwoods along the river and out across the flats toward Fallon, seventy miles, with the sun coming up white over the Stillwaters. She did not have a pie with her. She had nothing prepared to say. Mr. Quayle would have told her not to go. She was not going to argue anything.
At eight-forty she pulled up in front of 418 Sheckler Road and sat for a minute looking at the window of the room where her son was not, because he was at school, and then she got out and walked up the concrete path between Lorene's rosebushes, cut back for winter and wrapped in burlap, and knocked on the door.
Lorene opened it in her housecoat, with her reading glasses on a chain around her neck, and her face did the thing Coralee had watched it do for three and a half years, closing up like a fist.
"It's not your Saturday," Lorene said.
"I know it." Coralee put her hand in her pocket and found the coin and then, deliberately, took her hand out again and let it hang at her side. "I didn't come about the hearing. I came to ask you what you're afraid of, Lorene. All of it. Every bit. I want to hear the whole list, and I'm not going to argue with any of it. I just want to hear it."
Lorene looked at her for a long time, there on the step in the cold, with the burlap rosebushes on either side.
Then she stepped back from the door.
"You'd better come in, then," she said. "I'll put the coffee on. It's a long list."