Her answer was the strangest thing I had ever heard. Even at that age I guessed there was more to her story, but I also knew better than to ask.

A week later we were in McKale’s backyard climbing an avocado tree when a piece of paper fell out of her pants pocket. I jumped down and picked it up, then unfolded it. It was a creased photograph of a woman.

“Who’s this?” I asked, holding the picture up.

McKale looked horrified. “It’s no one.”

“It’s someone,” I said.

McKale climbed down from the tree. “If you must know, it’s my mom.”

“I thought you said you threw away all her pictures,” I said, naïvely pleased to have caught McKale in a lie.

Her eyes welled up with tears. “You are so dumb,” she said. She ran into her house leaving me alone in her backyard holding the picture of Pamela and wondering what I’d done wrong.

With that memory replaying in my mind, I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

Chapter Seven

C H A P T E R

Seven

Once you have opened the book

to another’s life, the cover

never looks the same.

Alan Christoffersen’s Diary

I woke with a start. I hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but after three nights of sleeping on hard ground, I was out before I knew it. I looked at the clock and saw that it was almost a quarter to nine. I groaned. “Pamela.”

I went to the bathroom and washed my face, then went outside and knocked on Pamela’s door. She answered immediately. “I wondered if you’d changed your mind.”

“No. Sorry, I fell asleep. Are you ready?”

She had probably been waiting for several hours, but she only nodded. “I’m ready.” She stepped out, shutting the door behind her. “Thank you.”

Wall Drug is not the single store it started as—it’s now a long row of buildings that look like a cross between a strip mall and a movie studio’s back lot western town. Wall Drug’s restaurant was located near the middle of the complex.

I held the door for Pamela as we walked into a large dining room separated into two eating areas by an open kitchen and a long row of cafeteria-style tray rails.

The seating area closest to the street had an ice cream bar and pastry counter with pie, brownies, and other confections, including a platter of their famous “free for veterans” cake doughnuts.

The wood-panel walls were hung with cowboy art: paintings of cowboys, horses, and Native Americans. They were all for sale, which was true of pretty much everything in the building.

There was only one couple in the dining room. Pamela followed me over to a table in the southwest corner of the room—opposite the other diners.

“We can sit here,” I said. “What do you want to eat?”