A ratchet clicked against oil-dark metal in the quiet of the half-light, and Talia Vance counted each turn by sound alone. Six. Seven. Eight. Her wrist found the bolt, found the angle, found the give. She let the tool drop into the open parts tray beneath the creeper and rolled out on her back, blinking up at the concrete ribbing overhead.
The shop sat where the highway forgot to keep being a highway, on the far edge of a town whose name you had to be from to pronounce correctly. At five in the morning the place belonged to her. Concrete floor slick with the night's condensation. Steel crossbeams catching the first copper suggestion of sunrise through the roll-up door she'd cracked six inches for air. A radio on the workbench murmured weather she'd stopped listening to three hours ago: chance of storms, chance of anything, chance of nothing in particular.
She sat up, wiped her palms down the front of her coveralls tied loose at the waist, and let her eyes readjust to the gloom.
Twenty-two years old. This was the first thing in a long while that fit.
The engine block suspended on the lift was a 302, an old Ford unit someone had donated to Otis Boone's shop with the promise of resurrection. Talia had spent the night pulling the intake manifold, cataloging the bolts by size on a magnetic tray, and pretending she hadn't noticed the thermos of coffee growing cold on the floor beside her knee.
Then she heard it. The soft crunch of gravel underfoot, hesitant at first, then steadier. A stranger's rhythm. Someone unsure of the ground they were walking on.
She didn't move from the creeper. Just tilted her head, listening the way her grandmother had taught her to listen for trouble back when trouble still had the decency to announce itself.
The roll-up door banged up another three feet, and a woman stepped in.
June Castellano. Talia knew her the way you know people in places like this without ever really knowing them at all: by reputation, by silhouette, by the particular tilt other voices used when they said the name. The woman who had come back to settle an inheritance. The daughter who had left, and then for whatever reason, hadn't stayed gone.
"Morning," June said. Her voice came out smaller than she probably intended, swallowed by the high ceiling and the metal racks of parts.
Talia pushed herself up off the creeper, her spine popping from four hours on her back. She found a rag on the bench, swiped once across each palm, and crossed the oil-stained concrete with the unhurried confidence of someone who had decided, somewhere around three a.m., that she owned this place.
"You're early," Talia said. "Most people wait until the sun actually shows up."
June blinked. Talia watched her take in the shop: the lift with its gutted engine, the pegboard of wrenches sorted by size, the calendar two months out of date, the small CRT television on the counter tuned to a local news affiliate with the sound off.
"Otis said six."
"Otis says a lot of things. Most of them involve the Lord and a smoked-brisket metaphor." Talia stopped a few feet away and extended her hand, palm still carrying the ghost of grease from the manifold bolts. "Talia Vance. I run this place when Otis isn't praying over the carburetor."
June took the hand. The grip was firmer than Talia expected, the calluses on June's palm softer than her own.
"June Castellano."
"I know who you are."
A beat. The radio murmured. Somewhere outside, a rooster found its purpose and announced it to no one in particular.
"How?" June asked.
"Small town. Big mouth. Pick your favorite." Talia released the handshake and stepped back, nodding toward the engine on the lift. "You here to look at the inheritance? Because I should warn you, whatever Otis promised you, half of it doesn't run and the other half runs wrong."
"I'm here to look at the shop."
"Same difference."
Talia watched June's eyes move across the space again, slower this time. She recognized the look. It was the look her own mother used to get, walking through their apartment in the city after the locks had been changed without notice: cataloging, assessing, deciding what to keep and what to leave on the curb.
"This was my uncle's," June said.
"I know."
"You seem to know a lot of things."
"I read the newsletter. I listen to Rosa Iglesias at the diner when she forgets I'm at the counter. And I have a functioning pair of ears." Talia went back to the creeper, kicked it under the bench, and hoisted herself onto the work surface, letting her boots swing free. "You want coffee? It's terrible. I made it four hours ago and it's been sitting on the floor like a patient dog, but it's warm-ish."
June looked at the thermos. Looked back at Talia.
"Sure."
Talia hopped down, grabbed the thermos, and poured two cups into mugs that didn't match. One said WORLDS BEST GRANDPA in fading letters. The other was plain white with a chip on the rim.
She handed June the chipped one.
"You came in from the city," June said, accepting the mug.
"Came in from a lot of places."
"And landed here."
"I landed here because the rent is cheap, the people don't ask questions unless they want something, and there's a forty-foot difference between here and anywhere a certain former employer might think to look." Talia took a sip from the Grandpa mug and made a face. "Also the coffee is free if you make it yourself."
June almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth moved a quarter inch and then reset itself.
"You're direct," June said.
"I'm from Detroit. We invented direct." Talia set her mug down on the bench. "What about you? You strike me as someone who spent a long time not being direct."
June didn't answer that. Instead she walked over to the lift, ran one finger along the edge of the disassembled engine block, and looked up at the gutted intake. The gesture was careful, almost reverent.
"This is a 302?"
"Single overhead cam, two-barrel carburetor. Somebody loved this engine once. Somebody also let it sit out behind a barn for eleven years, which is the automotive equivalent of abandonment issues."
June's laugh surprised them both. It came out short and rough, like a door that hadn't been opened in a while.
"You know cars," June said.
"I know this car. Otis asked me to get it running for the fall festival. Apparently there's a tradition involving this engine and a parade and someone named Lorraine Donnelly who I am told once drove it from here to Reno and back on a dare." Talia hopped back onto the bench, balancing the Grandpa mug on her knee. "I have my doubts about the Reno part."
"You believe the dare?"
"I believe Lorraine Donnelly once arm-wrestled Otis Boone for the last rib at the Fourth of July cookoff and won in under four seconds. I believe if she said she drove to Reno, she drove to Reno. Whether she came back is a question for somebody with stronger faith than me."
June turned from the engine and leaned against the workbench opposite Talia. Their knees were maybe three feet apart. The light through the half-open roll-up door had shifted from copper to pale gold, and the dust motes in the air between them had begun to drift in slow, indifferent spirals.
"So," June said. "Otis hired you."
"Otis inherited me. Like furniture. Someone dropped me off here eighteen months ago and he decided to keep me." Talia took another sip of coffee, grimaced again, set the mug aside. "I work on engines. I write things sometimes for the regional magazine. I don't talk about the city. That's the basic deal."
"What's the magazine pay?"
"Enough to keep the electricity on in my cabin when the temperature drops below freezing. Not enough to keep the propane tank full, but Rosa slips me tamales when I show up at the diner looking pitiful, which is most weeks."
"You write about cars?"
"I write about anything they'll print. Last month I did a four-hundred-word piece on the history of the town water tower. Before that, a profile of the high school quarterback who also raises pygmy goats." Talia shrugged. "Journalism school was a long time ago. You take what they give you."
June studied her. Talia could feel the assessment. The cataloging. The almost-questions forming and being swallowed before they reached the air.
"You were a journalist," June said.
Talia set the mug down on the bench beside her. The sound of ceramic on wood was louder than it should have been.
"I was a lot of things."
"And now you're in Otis Boone's shop at five in the morning pulling intake manifolds."
"And now I'm in Otis Boone's shop at five in the morning pulling intake manifolds." Talia met her eyes. "The universe has a sense of humor. Mine just runs darker than most."
The radio cut to a commercial for a feed store in the next county over, the announcer's voice cracking through the static. Outside, the sun had cleared the tree line, and the shop's interior was beginning to take shape in sharper relief. The racks of carburetors and distributor caps. The framed photograph of a young man in army uniform on the wall by the parts counter. The calendar with a different woman every month in various states of undress that Otis refused to take down despite Rosa's annual objections, which had become their own seasonal tradition.
June set her mug down and straightened up.
"Show me around?"
Talia slid off the bench and landed lightly. "I thought you'd never ask."
She moved toward the back of the shop, flicking on a string of overhead lights as she went. The bulbs buzzed and hummed in turn, and the interior revealed itself in sections: a welding station tucked behind a curtain of hanging rubber mats, a tire machine with a slow leak, a shelf of unlabeled paint cans that Otis had been meaning to sort since the previous administration.
"This," Talia said, gesturing at the welding station, "is where I spend most of my Sundays. That," she pointed at the tire machine, "is where Otis spends most of his Mondays, complaining about it. And those," she nodded at the paint cans, "are a future problem for someone who isn't me."
June moved through the space slowly, trailing her fingers along the workbenches the way some people trailed their fingers along the spines of books in a library. Reading the room. Reading the history. Talia let her look.
"Otis mentioned a Mustang," June said, her back to Talia.
"Otis mentions a lot of things."
"This one specifically."
Talia stopped walking. The string of lights buzzed above her head. She could hear her own breathing, and beneath it, the faint ticking of the engine block on the lift as the metal cooled in the early heat.
"That Mustang," Talia said carefully, "is a different conversation."
June turned around.
June turned around.
Talia watched her from across the garage, the string of bulbs still buzzing its uneven chorus above them. The light caught the planes of June's face in a way that made her look both very young and very tired. Talia recognized that particular exhaustion. She had worn it herself for the better part of a year.
"She's not mine," Talia said. "Not exactly."
June waited.
"She's been at the diner for eight years. Before that, she belonged to a man named Loren Hoffstadt, who lives in a double-wide outside of Cut Bank and who I have never met and do not ever intend to meet. He signed her over to Rosa in a divorce settlement. Rosa didn't want her. Rosa wanted the house. But she got the Mustang too, and the Mustang came with the house, and when the house burned in 'nineteen, the Mustang ended up out here, where she has sat ever since."
June took this in without interrupting. The quality of her silence had a professional shape to it, like the silence of someone who had learned to listen for a living.
"A 'sixty-seven," Talia added. "Candyapple red. Three on the tree. She needs everything."
"And you haven't fixed her."
"I fixed her brakes. I fixed her fuel pump. I replaced every rubber line under the hood. I have done, conservatively, four thousand dollars of work on a car I was told not to touch, for a woman who would prefer I didn't exist, on a vehicle that nobody in this town has any practical reason to drive, because the nearest Walmart is forty-three miles away and the road between here and there would rattle her teeth loose before she made it to the county line."
June's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "And yet."
"And yet."
The garage was very quiet except for the cooling engine block and the buzz of the lights. Somewhere outside, a screen door banged twice and went still.
"Can I see her?" June asked.
Talia jerked her chin toward the curtain. "She's around back."
They walked together through the shop, past the welding station where Talia's Sunday project sat half-skinned on its rolling cradle, past the tire machine with its slow leak, past the shelf of unlabeled paint cans that had become, over the years, less a problem and more a kind of geological feature. Talia pushed through the curtain and held it open with one hip, and the morning light hit them in a wash of dust and heat.
The Mustang sat in the gravel lot behind the garage, parked at an angle beneath a tarp Talia had rigged from a moving blanket and some bungee cords. From a distance, she looked like any other dead car. Up close, the truth of her condition became apparent. The paint had oxidized into a chalky pink. The chrome held more rust than shine. The passenger-side mirror was held on with electrical tape. The tires had gone flat and flat again over the years, and the rims now sat in four small craters of their own making.
But the body was straight. No collision damage, no rust-through. And when June stopped a few feet away and just looked, the way a person looks at something they are trying to read, Talia could see her seeing it.
"She's gorgeous," June said.
"She's a tragedy."
"Same thing, sometimes."
Talia almost smiled. Almost.
June moved closer, circling the car with the careful attention of someone cataloguing details for a story she hadn't started writing yet. She crouched by the front quarter panel and ran a finger along a patch where the paint had bubbled. She peered through the driver's window at the bench seat, which had split open along one seam and was leaking yellow foam like a wound. She straightened up and looked at Talia.
"How long have you been working on her?"
Talia considered lying. Decided against it. "Three years."
"On Rosa's car. The one you weren't supposed to touch."
"Technically on Rosa's car. Practically on my own conscience. The car and I have an arrangement. She sits there, I visit her, neither of us mentions it to Rosa."
June turned back to the Mustang. "She needs a motor."
"She needs more than a motor. She needs a fuel tank, a radiator, a complete rewiring of the ignition system. She needs new upholstery. She needs someone who knows what they're doing to go through the suspension piece by piece."
"But she's doable."
"She's doable." Talia crossed her arms. "That's the problem."
June didn't ask what she meant by that. She let the statement stand there in the gravel lot with the morning heat rising off it, and Talia was, despite herself, grateful.
"Can I see the rest of the shop?" June asked after a while.
"You've seen the shop."
"I've seen the parts of the shop you've decided to show me. There's a difference."
Talia tilted her head. "Meaning what."
"Meaning you've shown me the welding station and the tire machine and the mysterious paint cans. You have not shown me what's up there."
June pointed. Talia followed the direction of her finger and felt, with a small inward flinch, the place where the pull-down ladder descended from the ceiling of the storage loft.
"Nothing's up there," Talia said.
"I heard something."
"You heard the building settling."
"It sounded like a spoon."
The two of them looked at each other. Talia had forgotten, for a moment, that June Castellano had spent the last decade in rooms where people lied to her professionally. The realization arrived with the quiet weight of a small humiliation.
"Fine," Talia said. "You want to look, you look. Don't say I didn't warn you."
She crossed to the ladder, reached up, and pulled the metal hook. The ladder unfolded in two sections with the slow groan of hinges that wanted oil, and the upper half swung up into the dark square of the loft opening. Talia stepped back and gestured.
"After you."
June took the ladder one rung at a time, climbing with the deliberate care of someone who had not been on a pull-down ladder in some time. Her boots rang on the metal. The loft floor creaked when she pulled herself up. Then she was gone from view, and Talia was left standing in the shop with her arms crossed and her jaw set, waiting for what came next.
It came in the form of a silence that lasted a beat too long, and then another.
"Well?" Talia called up.
No answer.
"Talia," June said, from somewhere above. "You should probably come up here."
The loft was a low, dusty space built into the peaked roof of the garage, floored with unfinished plywood and lit by a single bulb on a pull chain. It smelled, in the way all lofts smell, of old insulation and forgotten cardboard. Around the perimeter sat the ordinary archaeology of a working shop: barrels of motor oil, coils of wire, crates of used parts, a ham radio that hadn't worked since the previous decade.
Behind the third barrel of motor oil, crouched on a folded moving blanket, was Otis Boone.
He was holding a can of pork and beans in his left hand. He was holding a spoon in his right hand. The spoon was halfway to his mouth. He was not moving. His eyes, which were the color of good coffee and twice as deep, were fixed on June with an expression Talia could only describe as theatrical arrest, the look of a man who had been caught in a private act and was now deciding which version of himself to perform.
"Otis," Talia said from the top of the ladder.
"Talia," Otis said. He did not lower the spoon. "You didn't tell me we were having company."
"I didn't know we were having company until twenty minutes ago."
Otis considered this. Then, slowly, with the gravity of a man who understood the value of a good entrance, he lowered the spoon into the can of beans, set the spoon on the rim with a faint clink, and brushed his hands on the knees of his coveralls.
"Well then," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Otis Boone, retired engineer of the Burlington Northern, de facto mayor of this here end of the road, pastor of the only Black Baptist church within fifty miles, and as of this present moment, an innocent man eating his lunch in the only quiet corner of an otherwise loud world."
June was still crouched at the top of the ladder, one hand on the rim of the loft, watching him with an expression that was doing some complicated work behind her eyes.
"The spoon's mine," Otis added, before she could ask. "I liberated it from the diner some years back. Rosa knows. Rosa has made her peace with it. Or rather, Rosa has made her peace with me, and the spoon is part of the arrangement."
"Otis," Talia said again.
"Child, I am looking at her."
He was, in fact, looking at June. He had the spoon now between two fingers, held upright like a small scepter, and he was tilting his head to one side the way a bird considers a particularly interesting worm.
"You must be the Castellano girl," he said. "I have heard about you. Rosa speaks well of you, which is high praise, because Rosa speaks well of very few people and God is not always among them."
June climbed the last few rungs into the loft and stood. The plywood dipped beneath her weight. "You must be Mr. Boone."
"You may call me Otis. Mr. Boone was my father. He was a difficult man and I did not always enjoy his company. I see no reason to summon him now that he is gone."
He extended a hand. June took it. Otis shook once, firmly, and then released her and gestured at the folded blanket across from him.
"Sit, if you've a mind. The beans are cold but they are mine, and I will share them with you under one condition."
"What's the condition?"
"That you do not tell Rosa I am up here. She thinks I am at home, working on my sermon. I am in fact working on my sermon, but I am working on it here, where the Lord and I have a private understanding that does not require the participation of her kitchen."
Talia leaned against the ladder frame and watched them. Otis had settled back onto his blanket, spoon retrieved, can of beans balanced on one knee. June had lowered herself, slowly, onto the crate of used parts beside him. Between them, the loft was very small and very quiet, and the dust moved in the slant of light from the single bulb.
"You write," Otis said to June, by way of opening. It was not a question.
"I do."
"I have read your pieces. Rosa leaves the magazines in the diner, and I read them between the eggs. You write well, but you write the way a person writes when they are trying not to be heard."
June's expression did not change. "That's a sharp thing to say to someone you met four minutes ago."
"I have been meeting people for seventy-one years, child. Four minutes is plenty."
did not answer right away. She sat with her hands on her knees, her posture the kind of careful stillness that Talia had learned to recognize in interviews: the body holding position while the mind decided how much to give.
"You don't know what I write about," June said finally.
"I know what you don't write about," Otis replied. "Your name is on every piece, and not one of them mentions that you came home. A woman who left this place twenty-three years ago drives back and rents a cabin and writes about the creek and the crops and the shape of the porch light at dusk, and not a single word about why. That's a careful woman, or a frightened one. I am too old to bother telling them apart."
The bulb above them ticked faintly in its socket. Somewhere below, the parts truck shifted as a gust pressed through the bay doors, and the metal groaned once and settled.
"I'm not frightened," June said.
"I did not say you were not brave. I said you were careful. A person can be both. A person can be brave as anything and still careful as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs."
Talia shifted her weight against the ladder. The wood was rough against her shoulder blades, and she could feel the grain through her jacket. She watched June's face and tried to read it the way she used to read sources in the city, the way she used to read editors, the way she had learned to read a room when a story was about to break one way or the other. June's jaw was set. Her eyes were dry. She was not going to cry in this loft, and she was not going to give Otis Boone whatever it was he was reaching for.
"You want the real reason," June said. "Fine. My mother is dying. The diner where your friend feeds you breakfast is going to be sold out from under her by the end of the year. I came back because there was nowhere else to go that I hadn't already ruined. There. Now you have it. Will you pass the beans."
Otis did not move. He looked at her for a long moment with an expression Talia could not quite name, something between recognition and sorrow, the way a man might look at weather he had seen coming.
"Rosa told me about the diner," he said quietly. "She told me two months ago. I have been praying about it every Sunday since, and I have not yet heard what the Lord intends. But I will tell you what I have heard in my own heart, which is sometimes the same thing and sometimes is not."
He set the spoon down carefully on the rim of the can.
"God does not always send the answer. Sometimes He sends the person. And then He leaves it to the person to decide what to do about it."
He picked the spoon up again.
"Now. The beans."
June reached across the gap between them and took the can. She did not eat, but she held it, and the gesture was enough.
They stayed up there another half hour. Talia came down the ladder first when the light outside began to thicken toward late afternoon. June followed, and Otis last, lowering himself with the exaggerated care of a man whose knees had opinions about gravity. Talia walked back toward her car alone, giving them the small privacy of the walk to the road.
She was sitting on the hood of her sedan, half-finishing a cigarette she had no business smoking, when she heard the truck.
It came down the county road the way trucks come on roads like this, slow and grinding, the engine working harder than it needed to. Primer-gray. A decade of dents along the driver's side. A load of firewood in the bed, lashed down with orange rope that had seen better years.
The truck pulled into the lot and stopped in front of June's car, and the driver got out without shutting the engine off.
Rosa Iglesias was a small woman, broad through the shoulders and hips, with gray-black hair pulled back in a braid that reached the middle of her back. She wore a green apron over a flannel shirt, and her hands were rough at the knuckles the way a cook's hands get when a person has spent forty years at the stove. She stood with the truck door still open behind her, arms folded across her chest, and she looked at June across the hood of Talia's car with an expression that had the heat of a kitchen in it.
"Your daddy built this place with his bare hands after your mama threw him out," Rosa said. Her voice was warm and musical even now, but there was an edge to it, a sharpness the way a good chile has sharpness, bright enough to clear the sinuses. "You gonna tear it down, or you gonna stand up?"
June had stopped halfway between Otis's truck and her own car. She had a piece of the loft dust on her sleeve. She did not brush it off.
"Hello to you too, Rosa."
"Don't you hello me. I have been calling you since Tuesday. I have left two messages on your phone and one on that cabin landline that sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well. You think I don't know what you're doing? You think I don't know the shape of a person who is trying to disappear on purpose?"
"I'm not trying to disappear."
"Then what do you call it? I feed half this county and I know when a person is hungry, and I am telling you, mija, you are hungry. You are starving and you are pretending you are full, and that has always been your worst trick."
Talia did not move from the hood of the car. She had put the cigarette out on the sole of her shoe and she was holding the dead filter between two fingers, and she was watching with the part of her brain that used to be good at her job, the part that recognized when something real was about to happen and knew enough to let it.
June took a step toward Rosa. Then another. She stopped about four feet away, which is exactly the distance a person stops when they want to have a conversation and not a fight, and which is also exactly the distance a person stops when they want to be able to run if they have to.
"I came back because I had to," June said. "Not because I wanted to. Not because I had a plan. I came back because there was nowhere else."
"There is always somewhere else. There is the city, there is the next town over, there is the road going north that everyone thinks is freedom. You came back here. You came back to this nothing place with one stoplight and a diner that doesn't even have a sign anymore. That is not nowhere else. That is a choice."
"It's not a choice if you're broke."
"Broke is a fact. Broken is a choice. I have been broke, June. I came up from Oaxaca with forty dollars and a cousin who lied about having a room for me. I know what broke looks like. It looks like you, standing in this parking lot, telling me you don't have a plan. That's not broke. That's broken. Those are two different things and one of them has a future and the other one doesn't."
The truck idled. The orange rope in the bed shifted slightly in the breeze. Somewhere out past the gas pumps a dog was barking, two short barks and a long one, the kind of pattern that means the dog is not really upset, just making sure everyone knows he is on duty.
Otis had come around the side of the parts truck and was leaning against the fender, arms folded, watching. He did not say anything. He had the look of a man who had lit the match and was content to let the fire find its own way.
June's hands were at her sides. She was not clenching them. That was something. Talia noticed. A person who is about to fight clenches first. A person who is about to listen doesn't.
"Rosa," June said. "I can't fix the diner."
"I didn't ask you to fix the diner. I asked you to stand up. Fixing comes later. Standing up comes first."
"What's the difference?"
Rosa unfolded her arms. She put one hand on the open door of the truck and the other on her hip, and the stance was so familiar, so completely the posture of a woman who has fed ten thousand people and buried more than her share, that for a moment the whole parking lot felt like the kitchen of her diner, even with the gas pumps and the cracked asphalt.
"The difference," Rosa said, "is that fixing is what you do with your hands. Standing up is what you do with your chest. I have watched you for two days now, coming in and out of my place, ordering coffee like a person who is ashamed to want anything, looking at the bulletin board like you are trying to memorize it and forget it at the same time. You are a person who has forgotten how to want anything out loud. That is what I am asking you to fix first. The rest we will figure out together because that is how things have always been done in this place, whether you remember it or not."
June looked at her for a long time. Then she looked down at the asphalt. Then she looked at Talia, who was still sitting on the hood of her car with the dead cigarette, and there was something in June's eyes that Talia had not seen before, something that was not yet a decision but might have been the space where a decision could land.
"Rosa," June said, and her voice was different now, quieter, the way a person's voice gets when they have stopped performing and started meaning it. "I don't know if I can stand up. I don't know if I remember how."
Rosa closed the truck door. The engine cut off. The parking lot got very quiet, the kind of quiet that rural places have at the end of an afternoon when the wind has dropped and the birds have paused between songs.
"Then I will teach you," Rosa said. "I will teach you the way my mother taught me, which is to put a wooden spoon in your hand and a plate in front of someone who is hungry and let the rest take care of itself. Come to the diner at five in the morning. Wear something you don't mind getting dirty. Bring that writer friend of yours if she can stay off her phone for two hours. We will begin."
She walked around the truck, untied the orange rope, and pulled a bundle of firewood out of the bed with a motion that made it look lighter than it was. She set it on the asphalt between June's car and her own, straightened up, and brushed her hands on her apron.
"That is not a request," Rosa said. "That is a summons. And if you do not come, I will come to that cabin, and I will bring food, and I will not leave until you have eaten at least half of it. I have done this before. I am very good at it. Ask anyone."
She looked past June at Otis, who tipped an imaginary hat from where he stood by the parts truck.
"Otis," she said. "Have you been feeding this girl cold beans from a can?"
"Now Rosa," Otis began.
"Mister Boone. I will deal with you later."
"Yes ma'am," Otis said, and his voice had the chastened warmth of a man who was not sorry and would do it again tomorrow.
Rosa got back into the truck. She started the engine. She looked at June one more time through the open window, and her face was the face of a person who had already decided something, who had decided it years ago possibly, and was only now waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
"Five in the morning, June. The bell rings at five. You hear it, you come. You don't hear it, you come anyway. That is how we have always done things in this place."
The truck pulled out of the lot, the wood shifting in the bed, the rope trailing a little at one end. The sound of the engine faded down the county road and was replaced by the dog, still barking his two-and-one pattern into the slow blue of the evening.
June stood in the parking lot with her arms at her sides and the piece of loft dust still on her sleeve. Talia got down off the hood of her car and walked over to her, and they stood there together without speaking, watching the road where Rosa had gone.
"She means it," Talia said finally.
"I know she means it."
"And?"
June looked at her. Then she looked at Otis, who had begun walking slowly toward his own truck, humming something under his breath that might have been a hymn and might have been a song he had heard on the radio that morning, and might have been both, the way things often are in places where the sacred and the ordinary share the same kitchen.
"And I think I'm going to go," June said. "I think I'm going to go at five in the morning and see what happens."
The light was going out of the sky the way it does in that part of the country, not in a rush but in degrees, the way a person lets go of something they have been holding too long. Somewhere behind the gas station a screen door banged shut, and then nothing, and then the first cicada of the evening began its slow counting in the trees.