In the night room Page 0,81

that, so it wasn’t some kind of optical illusion. Right?” This last word meant: You know something, and you are going to let me know, too.

“Right,” I said.

She sprinted off, no longer able to concern herself with an abstraction like dignity, and I went back to pumping gas. When the tank was full, I moved toward the little white box of the station, expecting to see Willy come through the door carrying a bag containing twenty dollars’ worth of candy bars. She still had not emerged by the time I reached the entrance, and I didn’t see her at the counter when I walked in. The boy at the cash register had H. R. Giger tattoos on his arms and short, dyed-blond hair that he wanted to look artificially colored. Willy was puttering around in the aisles at the back of the store. The boy took his eyes off her to register my entrance.

“Hey, dude,” he said. “Is that girl with you?”

“Yes,” I said, and went to the counter to hand over a credit card.

“Planning on a long trip?”

At the back of the store, Willy ducked out of sight. I heard the rustle of bags. Her head popped up above the top shelf, and my heart thumped in my chest at this sudden vision—Willy’s floating head. In spite of everything, all my love for her, which had been a bit subsumed under both concern and a kind of mild irritation, returned to me. She said, “I need more money. Come back here, Tim.” At least I had a name again.

She was trying to keep a grip on about a dozen loose candy bars, individual Reese’s Pieces, a container of Fiddle Faddle, bags of peanut M&M’s, and larger bags of potato chips. My arrival in her aisle caused a lot of Hershey’s bars to slither out of her grasp and land on the floor. Her hands seemed reassuringly solid, but her temperament was sizzling toward hysteria. “Shit!” she whispered to me, once again ducking out of sight of the attendant. “I’m so hungry I can’t hang on to this stuff.”

“Eat one now,” I said. “Save the wrapper, and we’ll pay for it later.” As I spoke, I started unwrapping one of the Hershey’s bars that had fallen to the floor. Before I finished, she tore it from my hands. The end of the bar disappeared into her mouth, and she bit off about three inches of almonds and milk chocolate.

“Oh, boy,” she said. She chewed with her eyes closed, and I could see some of the hysteria leave her. It was like watching her pulse slow down. “Dark chocolate would be better, but this is really, really okay.”

“I’ll get a basket,” I said, and in a moment was back beside her, tossing candy and junk food into a plastic supermarket basket. Willy squatted on her haunches, taking giant, irregular bites out of the Hershey bar almost faster than she could chew.

“Get me two more Score bars,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “Those little deals are wicked, wicked good.”

“We should get some real food in you,” I said.

“Yeah, I need a meal. But for some reason, this crap is what I need most right now. That lightness is beginning to go away.”

“Do you guys need any help?” the boy called out.

Up at the counter, I unloaded the basket under the increasingly skeptical eyes of the tattooed boy. He dug one hand into his bleached hair and shook his head, half-smiling. I signed a MasterCard slip for $73.37, a nice palindromic number.

Willy was looking at me with a stony intensity that promised a serious interrogation as soon as we got back in the car, and I asked the boy about the nearest town that had both a decent restaurant and a library.

“A library?” Willy interrupted the boy’s response.

“Before we can talk, I have to show you something.” I folded the credit card slip into my wallet and picked up our bag.

“In a book?”

“In an atlas.”

“You still want to know about the library?” the boy asked. “Just stay on 224 out there all the way to Willard. Like the rat movie. It has a library, and you could eat at Chicago Station. They’re famous for their pies.”

“Ahh, pies,” Willy said.

Off we go to Willard, which turned out to be a lot nicer than I’d expected. Willard is the sort of place people would retire to, if they had any sense. Like all small cities, it’s on a human scale, and there is