“Your brother paid the bill,” the woman said.
Was it the woman’s supposition they were brothers, or had McCallum told her that? If he had, he’d probably guessed there was a good chance the woman would repeat the information.
“Just need the key. I already given him the receipt,” she said.
“My brother,” Marshall said. “Was he able to find out from you where the nearest airport was?”
“Would have been, but didn’t ask,” the woman said. He saw that there was also a tooth missing on the bottom.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
He went back to the car and drove to the diner across from the motel. Climbing the steps, he saw at the top a plaster rabbit and three small plaster bunnies clustered around an empty terra-cotta planter into which someone had thrown a beer can and a used rubber. Inside, on a metal stand, the local paper was piled up, with a canister attached to the side of the rack marked 25 CENT HONNOR SYSTEM. A child’s doll lay on the bottom shelf, its blue dress folded under its head. He passed through the fog of cigar smoke rising into the air from the man paying his bill at the register and walked to the back counter. A short man in a denim jumpsuit was crumbling saltines into a bowl of tomato soup. Two seats away, a woman looked straight ahead and puffed a cigarette, a full cup of coffee in front of her.
“I’d like one of those bran muffins,” he said to the waitress, pointing into a hazy plastic container on the counter, “and a coffee to go. Light.”
“Tuesday,” the woman said. “Second muffin, Danish, or cream horn half price. Only one cream horn left.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then I guess I’ll have a Danish too.”
“Apple raisin strawberry.”
“Apple, please.”
She poured coffee, put the top on the container. With plastic tongs, she lifted an apple Danish from a tray, centered it delicately on a precut piece of foil she pulled from a box, and wrapped it. Then she opened the container that held the bran muffin, lifted it with the tongs, and dropped it, unwrapped, into a white bag. She carefully placed the pastry in the bag, closed the top, and handed him the coffee separately. “Cream’s at the register,” she said.
“I think my brother came in earlier,” he said. “Walked a little funny? Nice looking, about my height. I wondered how he was feeling this morning.”
“Feeling like he meant to leave town!” the waitress said. “I gave him our biggest takeout bag to write on, and I thought: I never seen a man write for so long about how to get to the airport. Either that is the most forgetful man in the world, or I gave such detailed directions I scared him to death.”
“Let me have a beef barley soup and more of these crackers,” the short man down the counter said.
“Let me once in my life live someplace where people eat breakfast at breakfast and lunch at lunch and dinner at dinner,” the woman two seats away said to the waitress.
“I heard that at Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casino, if you’re winning big you can call for poached eggs on toast at two in the morning and have them carried right up to you on a silver platter as long as you don’t push back your chair and walk away with your winnings,” the waitress said.
“You thinking about rejoining the fire department?” the woman said. It was the first indication she knew the man.
“Might,” he said.
“Silly snit, if you ask me. This isn’t a community where one person taking exception to another person can ruin things to the point where we don’t have enough firemen.”
“Beef barley,” the waitress said, lifting the pan off the burner and pouring it into a bowl. She put the bowl on a plate and carried it to him, doing a deep knee bend to pick up one package of crackers on the way.
“I order more crackers, tell me no,” the man said.
“That’s what I like,” the waitress said. “A man who tells me what to tell him. You want to put the words right in my mouth, Randall?”
“ ‘Oh, Randall, you look so handsome today,’ ” Randall said in falsetto.
The woman on the stool laughed.
“Hear me repeating them?” the waitress said. “Then everybody’d really have something to laugh about, because Betty would have finally lost her mind.”
Marshall smiled, taking the bag and coffee container to the cash register.
“What do you think it is about banana nut?” the woman said, peering into the bag, then punching cash register keys. A dollar and fifty-one cents came up, and the woman automatically reached into a dish for a penny as she gave Marshall two quarters. He pocketed them, thanking her, then took two small, wet half-and-half containers from an ice bucket. “Used to be everybody preferred banana nut.”
In the car, he broke off a piece of muffin and ate it while looking at the map. He wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t call McCallum and wish him well, just for the sake of closure. There was a phone booth in the gas station, beyond the diner, but someone was inside. Marshall moved his finger along Route 84 toward this day’s destination: somewhere in South Carolina. It couldn’t start to get warm fast enough. Just walking from the diner to the car, his feet felt frozen. He scuffed them back and forth on the floor, trying to warm them a little with the friction. He turned on the radio and searched for a station, stopped when he heard music he thought was Beethoven. The person was still in the phone booth. He took another bite of muffin, dropped the remaining lump in the bag. He peeled back a little rectangle of plastic from the top of the coffee container and sucked up mostly air, deliberately, testing to see how hot the coffee was. Hot enough to make him shiver, because his body was so cold. No McCallum up front, so he could leave the map unfolded on the seat. On the floor, he saw one of McCallum’s pens. Thinking about that, and about the shirt, he had the sudden image of a snowman that had melted and could be conjured up only by the carrot on the ground, the black coal eyes. That brought to mind the snowman and snow woman on campus he had seen when he went back after Evie’s funeral. He thought briefly about the snow woman’s breasts with their spoutlike nipples, then remembered Sophia Androcelli’s irate letter to the newspaper, preceded by her equally irate comment to him that he shouldn’t dismantle the snowpeople when he went outside. The person was off the phone, so he started his ignition and drove onto the road, then immediately turned off, coasting to a stop in front of the phone booth. When he got there, he was sure he didn’t want to call McCallum. Instead, suddenly and surprisingly on the verge of tears, he dialled his own number, to talk to Sonja. His hand was shaking. An automated voice asked him to reenter his card number. Then the call went through, and he heard the familiar double ring of his home phone, over and over, ringing in the empty house. She wasn’t there. It seemed more than possible she wouldn’t be, but it made him suspicious that she might be with Tony. It seemed completely far-fetched she would be buying groceries. Ludicrous to assume she would have returned to the dry cleaner’s so quickly. Then, taking a deep breath, he hung up and began rationalizing another way. What if he had reached her? What was there to tell her? More about McCallum’s odd behavior; chitchat in a diner. He drove away, but was only on the road a few minutes when he decided he’d made the wrong decision; it was the sound of her voice he needed to hear, not Beethoven, not his own roiling thoughts, the silent conversations he’d begun having with himself. He dialled the area code, but couldn’t remember the number of Hembley and Hembley. The thought of Tony made his fingers tingle, so he took another deep breath and reminded himself that except for calling, he wouldn’t need to have anything to do with Tony ever again. Even Sonja was fed up with Tony. Hadn’t she said that? Forcing calmness into his voice, he reached New Hampshire information and asked for the number, tracing the numbers on the dusty metal shelf under the phone. His fingers were so sweaty, the numbers were perfectly legible. He called the number, hoping Tony wouldn’t answer the phone. Gwen, the other agent who worked there, answered, but he didn’t want to talk to her either; he disguised his voice, finding it very little trouble to sound tremulous and slightly high-pitched. And she was there. Sonja had gone back to work. Sonja was there!