"They're not looking for me, Grandpa," she said quietly.
Silas frowned. "What do you mean?"
"My foster father... he was arrested six weeks ago," Maya said, her voice dropping to a steady, bitter whisper. "Federal tax fraud and embezzlement. The state revoked their license. They were going to split me into a group home in Salem until I turned eighteen. The agency didn't even file a missing person report when I left; they thought I ran to my foster mother's sister in Idaho. The case worker hasn't checked on that house in two months. Nobody owns me, Grandpa. Nobody is looking for me except the county welfare office, and they don't even have my current picture."
She tore the page from the legal pad, crumpled it into a tight ball, and dropped it into the empty coffee cup.
"I have two thousand dollars in my boot," she added, her chin lifting with that same stubborn, reckless tilt her mother had possessed when she was seventeen. "I saved every penny of my allowance and birthday money for four years. I bought bus tickets with cash. I walked when the buses stopped. I came here because this is where my mother said you would be if the world ever fell apart."
Silas sat completely still, listening to the words wash over him.
The heavy, suffocating paralysis that had gripped his soul for seven years—the grey fog of fatalism that told him he was nothing, that he had no right to fight, that the system had won—began to burn away, replaced by an old, familiar heat. It was the same heat that had carried him through two tours in the Mekong Delta, the same heat that had kept him upright when his motorcycle laid down at eighty miles an hour on the Black Hills pass, the same heat that had made men step off the sidewalk when he walked into a room.
He wasn't an old man waiting to die in a cinderblock hut anymore.
He was a grandfather. And his pack had come home.
Silas reached down, picked up the torn photograph from the table, and carefully slid it into the inside pocket of his flannel shirt, right against the steady, thumping warmth of his ribs.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a worn leather billfold, and laid a twenty-dollar bill beside Marge's untouched pie.