Chapter 4: Graylick

"Then we go to your diner," Deacon said from the doorway.

He was dressed, shaved, and holding the canning jar.

I hadn't heard him come in.

"Twenty-three," he said, and set it on my tray next to the pancakes. "Every last one."

I looked at the jar.

Twenty-three.

"Good morning to you too," Bowie said.

We left at nine in Deacon's truck, black and too clean, with me in the middle of the bench seat.

Two hours down the mountain.

Neither of them touched me.

Both of them sat like they were thinking about it the whole way.

The Ridge road went from blacktop to patched blacktop to gravel.

Then the trees opened, and there was Graylick.

One street along the creek. The coal tipple rusting over the river like a dead crane.

The company store with its windows boarded. The post office. The church with half a steeple.

And the diner, with its sign that said EAT and nothing else.

Deacon slowed down.

I watched him look at it.

Eight months ago he'd been carried in here bleeding, and he'd seen nothing but my ceiling.

Now he saw the houses with tarps on the roofs and the yards full of cars that didn't run.

An old woman on a porch stood up out of her chair.

She looked at the Lovett truck.

She came down her steps, walked to the road, and spat on our front tire.

"Well," Bowie said. "Warm welcome."

"She's eighty-one," I said. "She buried two sons this year. Neither one had a doctor."

Deacon didn't say anything.

He parked in the diner lot.

The same lot.

I saw his hand go to his ribs before he opened the door.

The bell over the diner door rang, and every head at the counter came around.

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