Mike turned to Brenda. She was leaning against the counter with her arms crossed, and her expression was the expression of a woman who has seen the whole thing and is not going to inflate it with sentiment, but is not going to dismiss it either. You're going to lock the door after us, Mike said. Give it an hour before you open back up. I was planning to, she said.
Good. He looked at her with something that went past the transaction of the night, something that recognized her specifically, not as a civilian he'd protected, but as a person who had held herself together through something genuinely frightening, and had done it with more grace than most people managed in comfortable circumstances. "You did well tonight," he said. Brenda looked back at him. "I made coffee," she said.
Yes, you did, Mike said. And in my experience, that's often exactly what the situation calls for. She pressed her lips together and nodded once, and that was the end of that, and it was enough. Mike walked to the door. Bobby followed.
Declan followed. At the door, Mike stopped. He looked back at Leo one final time across the length of the diner. "The Honda Civic," he said. Leo stiffened slightly.
"What about it?" "Leave it," Mike said. "Walk away from it. Everything in your life that puts you behind that wheel tonight, leave it with the car." He held Leo's eyes. "You can walk a long way from a parking lot if you decide to." Then he went through the door, and the night took him, and Bobby and Declan went through after him, and the door swung shut with the ordinary sound of a door closing, the most normal sound in the world. Leo and Cory sat in booth 2 and listened to the engines build, the four of them together, now rising through a register that moved from rumble to roar.
And then the sound of them moving, pulling away from the diner in the direction of the highway. The pitch shifting as they accelerated, and then the sound traveling, moving out across the desert floor, diminishing without disappearing the way a sound does in open country where there's nothing to stop it. It got smaller and smaller and smaller, and then it was just the desert. Dennis Parish cleared his throat. He stood up, picked up his keys and his coat, and looked at Leo and Cory with the expression of a man who has processed something and arrived at an uncomplicated conclusion about it.
"I'm going to finish driving to Vegas," he said, and I'm going to check in somewhere and sleep for about 12 hours. He buttoned his coat. I want you both to know that I am genuinely glad everyone is alive. Yeah, Leo said. Me, too.
Dennis nodded, looked at Brenda. Ma'am, best eggs I've had in this highway. Good night. He put money on the table, picked up his bag from under the seat, and walked out the door with the purposeful movement of someone who has made a decision and is executing it cleanly. The door closed behind him, and then it was just Leo and Cory and Brenda.
Brenda came around the counter and sat down in the booth across from them. Not booth 9, not the Angel's booth, but the booth directly across from Leo and Cory, close enough to be a conversation. And she set her a coffee mug on the table and looked at both of them with the direct uncomplicated attention of a woman who has decided that the professional part of this night is over. And this is the human part. "Where are you from?" she said., Leo blinked.
"What, originally?" she said. Before all this. Where are you from? Leo looked at her. The question was so ordinary, so completely outside the register of everything the night had been that for a moment he couldn't locate the answer.
Then he did. "Rialto," he said. "I grew up in Fontana," Brenda said. Twenty minutes from each other. She drank her coffee.
Small world. Yeah. Leo said something was happening in his chest that he didn't have an exact name for. Not emotion in the dramatic sense. Not tears or anything that performed itself.
Just a quiet loosening. The particular release of a person who has been holding themselves together for so long that they've forgotten what it feels like not to. "You should call your sister," Brenda said. Leo looked at her. "I heard your friend say it," she said.
"He's right. Call her." Leo reached into his pocket and took out his phone. The screen lit up with the same missed calls he'd been ignoring for 6 weeks. Maria's name there at the top of the list with a number next to it that was now large enough to constitute its own kind of accusation. He looked at it.
"It's four in the morning," he said., "Yes," Brenda said. "Call her anyway." Leo pressed call. It rang twice. Then his sister's voice came through alert and immediate in the way of someone who had not been deeply asleep, who had perhaps never fully stopped waiting. And she said, "Leo." And the word had 6 weeks of worry packed into it.