Kristen regarded me with a mix of pity and exasperation. To Stormy, she said, “Do you usually drive or does he?”

“I will,” Stormy said. “Let’s go, Oddie.”

Stormy and I started toward the cottonwoods, but then I had to hurry back to Roberta to return her rolling pin. I didn’t look at Kristen again.

Six

While Stormy drove us to the fairground, I called Chief Wyatt Porter, who was something of a surrogate father to me, and told him what had happened, when, and where. As usual, he would do his best to keep me out of the official story.

In the fairground parking lot, Stormy wanted to sit in silence, with the windows up and the air conditioner running. We watched the late-afternoon light darkle from peach to apricot to cherry, and after a few minutes she closed her eyes, whereupon I looked not at the colorful western sky but at her.

Eventually she said, “When high school’s over and real life starts, can you go on being a fry cook?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“With everything…everything else in your life?”

“Because of everything else, being a fry cook keeps me sane.”

“Sooner or later, it’s all going to overwhelm you—what you see, what you can do, what you are.”

“I’m getting a better handle on it all the time,” I assured her. “If my messed-up parents couldn’t drive me crazy, I’m not going to go nuts just because I can see the lingering dead.”

“And have prophetic dreams.”

“Not a big deal.”

“And have psychic magnetism,” she said, referring to another gift of mine that played no role in that day’s adventure.

After a silence, I said, “Maybe what you’re really wondering is if eventually it’s all going to overwhelm you.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not an easy date.”

She said nothing.

The next silence was excruciating, and I became the one who at last broke it. “What I want most of all isn’t you. What I want most of all is for you to have a happy life.”

Her thick eyelashes suddenly glistened with tears that she held back. “I really want that ice-cream shop of my own.”

“I bet you’ll have a chain of them.”

“This far in life, I’ve been nobody.”

“You’ve been somebody to me. You’re everything.”

“I want to be somebody, odd one. I want to have a business that I can be proud of, a place where people like to go. When people hear my name, I want them to think of ice cream. I want my name to make them happy, the way ice cream makes them happy.”

If I assured her that she would achieve her dream, I would be failing to provide her with the one thing that she demanded of me: the truth, whether it was easy or hard to hear. I could not see the future. If I happy-talked her through this moment, if I insisted that my paranormal gifts would only enhance our lives together and would all but guarantee her success, if I minimized the difficulty of my own struggles with my sixth sense, I would be lying to her.