Chapter 24: Tucumcari

The Sinclair station outside Tucumcari had a new roof and a green dinosaur on its sign.

The lot had been repaved.

Nothing else about it had changed.

I parked at the pump where the white van had once sat with its engine running, and I turned off the car.

Lorna did not move.

She sat in the passenger seat in her gray coat with her hands in her lap, looking through the windshield at the glass doors.

"This is where you stood," she said.

"I think so. It was dark. Almost morning."

"You were six."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long time.

Behind us, Levi's truck pulled in and stopped, and I saw Cassidy in the passenger seat, watching us, not getting out.

"I'd like to go in with you," Lorna said at last. Her voice was small. "If you'd let me."

"I'd like that."

"But you should do it your way first."

I looked at her.

"I don't want to be the one who tells you what this was," she said. "I want you to walk in there and see what it is now."

I took a breath that went all the way down, and opened the car door.

The bell on the glass door rang as I pushed it.

The store was bright and cold and smelled of coffee and floor cleaner, and it was exactly the same store.

An old woman stood behind the register, with white hair cut short and reading glasses on a chain.

She looked up.

I stood there with the door open at my back and could not make myself say what I'd planned.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was here once. A long time ago."

She took off her glasses and looked at me for a very long moment.

"A little girl in braids," the woman said slowly. "In a pink shirt, with a twenty-dollar bill in her fist."

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