When he returned he unhitched and unharnessed the horse and stabled it in the small shed behind the restaurant, forking hay into its manger and filling the tub with fresh water pumped up in the yard and carried in by the bucketful. He rubbed the horse down with a piece of old sacking. Outside now was humid and rancid and he dragged out an old patched canvas tarpaulin from the wagon bed and covered tightly the baskets of food. Then he went into the kitchen of the restaurant which was still, clean and empty but for the girl. She was eating a plate of bread fried and dredged with syrup. She was ten or eleven, very pretty. Old enough to study Jamie carefully and not quite old enough to know why. He sat across from her.

“What’s your name?”

“Loredona. I already know yours.”

“You cook that up yourself?”

She looked down at the plate and back up to him, embarrassed. As if he’d caught her out someway.

He said, “Your father out front?”

She nodded. As if she could not speak to him. No longer the absorbed self-important child directing him over maps hours before. She almost made him angry. Very gently he said, “Loredona. Please run ask your father to come here a moment when he gets a chance. Tell him I’m back.”

And watched her go through the swinging door to the front, her pretty hair down her back and her legs bare below her knees. When she passed through the door a low surge of voice and thronged presence filled the opening. He knew it could be Victor coming back or the two fuckers in cheap suits from the night before. But left his knife where it was in his pocket and reached fast across the table to cut the slightest wedge from her fried bread with her own fork and smear the wedge through the syrup before taking it into his mouth and swallowing it, pulling the fork back slowly through closed lips. Set the fork back on the plate, turned the way it had been.

The girl came back with her father and with a hand motion Victor brought Jamie away from the table to the yard where they peeled the canvas back and Victor went around the wagon, touching each basket with the first two fingers of his left hand as if counting but Jamie knew it was something more than inventory. Then they replaced the canvas and Victor paid him. It was more than he’d expected. There was no talk of the work done or the morrow. Victor gave him a loaf of bread. And went back inside.