Danny thought they should bring it by the diner to show Joey’s mother. He was trying to be responsible. Mr. Minton had taped the bag for motion sickness to the refrigerator, and Danny was making his way through the list, breaking down the old outhouse, shoveling through a century of waste. With his mother’s help, he bought a respirator from a catalog and wore it all day long at the farm. He gritted his teeth through sneezes and thought about Joey and walked around feeling numb. He touched his throat. He couldn’t shake how their friend had looked when they left him.

Ralph was reluctant to give over the postcard. He didn’t want to go. He said Joey’s mother wouldn’t care. “She’s the one who left him.”

Danny went to the diner by himself in the afternoon, when he knew it wouldn’t be too busy. He sat at the counter and ordered a milk shake. Joey’s mother was standing at the entrance of the kitchen and smoking a cigarette. She looked like a cake under glass, beautiful but tasteless.

“Excuse me,” said Danny, even though he knew. “Are you Joey Rudolph’s mother?”

She put down her cigarette and held still for a moment before exhaling. She was wearing makeup. Danny could see where she had missed a spot on the side of her face—a blotch of lighter skin, like the peel after a burn.

“That’s me,” she said.

Danny handed her the postcard. The afternoon sun was blinding against the metal edge of the jukebox, the chrome of the napkin dispensers. He suddenly felt he shouldn’t have come. Joey’s mother looked at what he had given her and smiled hard.

“This isn’t his handwriting,” she said. “It isn’t even post-marked. Are you trying to be funny?”

Danny didn’t know what to say. He held on to the glass his milk shake was in. His fingers were cold and wet, and he felt like a fool, because he knew then that Ralph had done it. Joey’s mother snapped the card down in front of him and turned away to sweep her tips off the tables.

When he got home Ralph was waiting for him. Danny handed the card over and sat on the fence. They were still friends, and they would still be friends when Ralph left for college and when Danny got Samantha Rimes pregnant. They’d see each other when their fathers had strokes and Mrs. Minton dyed her hair and remarried. They’d sell the farm and the garage and move away and wonder how the other was and then they wouldn’t.

The turkeys hurried across the field. They pecked at one another when they got too close. Ralph tore the postcard from Flagstaff into pieces and fed it to them.