am I going to do?”

Junior blew out his breath. He went into the kitchen and returned with a half-gallon carton of whole milk and set it on the counter.

“How much is it?” the driver of the Nissan asked.

“Two bucks.”

The driver of the Nissan put a single bill on the glass countertop and began counting pennies, nickels, and dimes on top of it. He exhausted the coins in one pocket and began searching in the other.

“Forget it,” Junior said.

“I got to pay you for it.”

“You a Christian?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put it in the plate.”

“God bless you, sir.”

Junior nodded, his mouth a tight line. He watched the man go out the door into the lot, then turned his attention to Vikki. “Next,” he said.

“I’m sorry to quit on you without notice. I know you’ve got your hands full,” she said.

“It’s that boy, isn’t it?”

“I need my money, Junior.”

He glanced at some penciled numbers on a scrap of paper by the register. “You got a hundred and eighty-three dollars and four cents coming. You’re gonna have to take a check, though. I need it for the IRS and four other agencies I pay on your behalf.”

“Can’t you stop acting like a shit?”

He raised his eyebrows, then exhaled out his nose. He shoved a receipt book toward her and opened the cash register. “I saw that guy with the beard trying to come on to you out there,” he said as he counted out her money.

“You know him?”

“No.”

“He’s probably drunk.” She started to say something else. She looked over her shoulder. She could see the Trans Am next to the nightclub. The two men were not in it and not in the parking lot, either.

Junior handed her the bills and silver he had counted out of the drawer and added ten dollars to it. “You had that coming out of the tip jar. Take care of yourself, kid.”

She lifted her thermos. “You mind?”

“Why ask me?”

She went behind the counter and opened the coffee spigot above her thermos and filled it with scalding coffee. She closed and opened her eyes, suddenly realizing how tired she was.

She used the restroom and went back outside. The man with the orange beard was sitting in the passenger seat of his vehicle, eating Mexican food from a Styrofoam container with a small plastic fork, the car door hanging open, his feet on the gravel. The driver of the vehicle was nowhere in sight, but the engine was running, a clutch of keys vibrating in the ignition.

“I was on a destroyer escort in Fort Lauderdale three days ago,” the man with the orange beard said. “I’ve been around the world four times backward. That means I’ve been around the world eight times. What do you think of that? You ever been around the world?”

“I have,” Junior said from the door of the diner. “Want to tell me about your travels? I was middleweight champion of the Pacific fleet. You a tomato can?”

“A what?”

“A bleeder. Keep bothering my waitress like that and see what happens.”

Vikki got into her vehicle and turned around in the lot but had to wait for an eighteen-wheeler to get past before she could drive back onto the highway. In her rearview mirror, she saw the man in the top hat come out of the nightclub and get in the Trans Am. He wore jeans and suspenders and a white T-shirt, and his torso was too long for his legs. The man with the beard closed his car door and tossed the Styrofoam container and the uneaten food out the window.

Vikki pressed the accelerator to the floor, the safe electric glow of the truck stop and diner disappearing behind her. A newspaper flew off the asphalt like a bird with giant wings and whipped through the front window and wrapped itself on the crown of the passenger seat before spinning in a vortex inside the car. She slapped the tangle of pages down with one hand and tried to see who was behind her. There were several sets of headlights in her rearview mirror now, and she couldn’t tell if any of them belonged to the man with the orange beard.

A truck passed her, then an open convertible with a teenage girl sitting on top of the backseat, her arms outspread in the wind, her chin lifted, her blouse flattening on her breasts, as though the stars and the bloom of the desert and the warm nocturnal loveliness of the moment had been created especially for her.

When Vikki rounded