Recalculating

On the boy's screen, Mario jumped into a pit, came back at the same checkpoint, and jumped into the pit again.

The father glanced over from the wheel. "You've been dying on that part since Glenwood Springs."

"I've been dying on it since Rifle."

"Try a different route."

"There's only one route, Dad. You just have to get the timing right."

The Garmin on the windshield flickered and went black.

"Damn it."

"What happened?"

"The GPS died." He tapped the screen, and the screen stayed black. "It doesn't matter. I know the way."

Every other weekend for three years he had spent four hours on I-70 getting from Grand Junction to Denver and four hours getting back. Before every trip he ran the BMW through the car wash on North Avenue, and every trip the interstate put the bugs back on its grille before Rifle. The exits came in the same order every time, and so did the rest stops, and so did the dead stretch in Glenwood Canyon where the phones gave up and the boy came up out of his screen long enough to say one of the four or five things he said on this drive.

The boy looked up from his Switch. The screen had turned his face blue.

"I'm hungry."

The dashboard clock read 7:40. He had told the boy's mother they would be in Denver by eight. By now the road should have opened into more lanes and more light and the first billboards for injury lawyers and dispensaries. Between them, those two industries held the Front Range together. In three years of this drive, the road had never once had trees growing over it.

His phone sat in the cupholder with no bars on it. The phones gave up in Glenwood Canyon, and Glenwood Canyon was two hours behind him.

"We'll stop soon."

The road narrowed from three lanes to two.

BRRRRRRRRRR.

The tires ran over the rumble strip where the second lane ended, and then the road was one lane wide. There were no construction signs and no cones. The pines came in from both sides and locked their branches over the asphalt, and under the branches the BMW's headlights switched themselves on.

A gap opened in the trees, and chrome and glass caught the low sun.

The boy sat up. "Oh, cool, that's a real diner."

HOLDEN'S DINER pulsed on the roof in the pink-red a person sees through shut eyelids when facing the sun. Beside the diner stood a Sinclair station, and the green dinosaur on its sign looked wet with new paint.

The father pulled into a lot half full of cars that belonged behind velvet rope. A turquoise-and-white '57 Chevy sat beside a Hudson Hornet in deep maroon, and every panel in the lot held the wet shine of metal that had never left a showroom. None of the plates were from Colorado.

The boy pressed his forehead to the window. "Is it a car show?"

Nobody had put up a sign or a rope, and nobody circled the cars with a polishing cloth. The cars sat at careless angles, and every one of them was empty.

"It must be."

Ding-ding.

Inside, the air was bacon grease and coffee. Red vinyl booths ran along the windows, and every table had a little chrome jukebox bolted to it. A counter ran the length of the room in front of a row of fixed stools, and the black-and-white linoleum carried enough wax to hold their reflections. Through the pass-through window, a cook in a paper hat worked the flattop in short, certain strokes. Pancake batter hit the griddle, and the smell went sweet and thick. A burger spat on the steel and built its crust, and out of sight onions were going brown.

A waitress crossed the floor to meet them. Her blonde hair sat in pin curls, her lips were red, and her eyeliner ended in wings. Her white uniform had been starched so many times it held its shape without her. Her nametag said CONNIE.

"Well, look at these two handsome fellas coming in for supper."

The boy grinned. The father's mouth made the same shape before he could stop it.

She led them to a booth by the window. The vinyl gave under them, and it was as warm as a seat somebody had just left. The menus landed heavy and laminated. A hamburger cost 40¢. A malted milk cost 25¢.

Connie's eyes went to the father's left hand and the gold band on it. "Will the missus be along, or is it just you two tonight?"

"It's just us." His thumb turned the ring once around his finger.

"Well, she's missing out." Connie set down two glasses of water, and the ice knocked against the glass. "You fellas take your time."

The boy tilted the menu toward his father. "Is this for real?"

"It's throwback pricing. They'll add a multiplier at the register."

"It's still cool."

The boy ran his finger down the list, and his thumb worked the skin beside his index nail without his looking at it. He set his Switch on the seat beside him.

Coffee came in white mugs thick enough to survive a bar fight. The father wrapped both hands around his and let the heat come through the ceramic into his palms.

The boy handed Connie his menu. "I'll have the pancakes. Can I get the big stack?"

"That's an excellent choice, sweetheart. And what can I fix for Dad?"

"I'll have the burger, medium, with fries."

"I'll bring it right out."

She crossed back to the counter. Her shoes made no sound on the linoleum.

The pancakes came stacked high enough to throw a shadow across the table, and butter ran down their sides in slow yellow trails. The burger filled the father's hands with a weight and a shape they had held before: a hand-formed patty, uneven at the edges, real American cheese melted into the grain of the meat, and a bun with structural integrity.

The boy talked through his first bite. "Oh my God, these are incredible. They taste like the old house."

The father bit into his burger and stopped chewing.

It was pickle juice. It was his father's trick. The old man worked pickle juice into the ground chuck before he formed the patties, and he admitted to that much and kept the rest: which pickles, how much, how long the meat sat. The father had spent twenty years chasing it through different pickles, different beef, and different ratios, and he had never come close. The old man went down on his kitchen floor one November with one hand on the counter and the other reaching for the spice rack, and the rest of the recipe went into Orchard Mesa Cemetery with him.

The father set the burger down. He picked it up again and took another bite, and then he looked out the window at the lot and at the trees past the lot until he could look at the table again.

Connie stood at his elbow with the coffee pot in her right hand. "Is it good, hon?"

"It's perfect."

She topped off his mug without asking, and the stream cut off clean at the rim. "Are you boys from around here?"

"We're passing through. We're headed to Denver."

Her hand stopped. A drop of coffee let go of the spout, and while it fell, her pupils opened until her irises were thin blue rings, and the expression dropped off her face, and the skull pushed up against the skin at her brow and her cheekbones.

Tik.

The drop hit the saucer. She blinked, and the smile came back, and her lips clamped down tighter around it.

"Denver's quite a drive."

She was staring past his shoulder. The father followed her stare across the aisle to a man on the end stool, an arm's length away, who sat turned toward the booths in a gray flannel suit and kept his fedora brim-up beside his coffee. The man held The Denver Post open to an inside page and did not look up from it. The front page faced the father. Under the masthead, the date read June 15, 1957.

The father looked around the room.

In the corner booth, a teenage couple leaned over one tall milkshake with two straws, and their foreheads nearly touched. The girl wore a letterman jacket three sizes too big. She laughed at whatever the boy said and covered her mouth with her fingers.

The father looked away and looked back.

She laughed the same laugh and covered her mouth with the same fingers. Her sleeve fell to the same point on her elbow, and the fold landed in the same crease at the same angle. The milkshake stayed at the same level. The condensation held still on the glass like beads set in resin.

At a middle booth, a little girl lifted a drumstick, bit into it, and set it down, and the meat sat whole. She lifted it again and bit the same spot, and her teeth closed on unbroken skin. It was the most eaten drumstick in Colorado, and it was still whole.

The man at the counter turned a page, and it was the same page. His wrist made the same turn, the paper made the same rustle, and his elbow settled on the Formica at the same angle. His cigarette rested in a glass ashtray, and its smoke went up in a line straight enough to have been ruled. The cigarette had been burning since before the Surgeon General had an opinion, and it had not lost any length.

The diner hummed, and the father picked the voices apart.

"Eisenhower's doing a fine job, if you ask me."

"That new Bel Air's a real beauty."

On the jukebox, the trombone in the Sinatra record climbed to its loud part and came down again. The father waited for it to come back around.

"Eisenhower's doing a fine job, if you ask me."

"That new Bel Air's a real beauty."

The father set his coffee down and opened his mouth.

"Now, who's saving room for pie?"

Connie had been at the counter filling a water glass when he opened his mouth. Now she stood at his elbow with her order pad on her hip and a pencil behind her ear, and her smile ran at the same wattage it had at the door.

"Can we get pie?" The boy's eyes went to the rotating case by the register. "They have pie, Dad. It's in that spinning thing."

The father looked at his son, at the syrup in the corner of his mouth and the grin around it. The booth held them in its warm vinyl, and the jukebox played Sinatra, and the boy hummed along off key, and past the lot the highway waited, and down the highway the exit at Golden waited, where the ring would come off his finger and go into the center console as it did every time, and past Golden the porch waited, where the BMW would sit at the curb with four hours of bugs on its grille and the Patagonia vest would rest a hand on the small of his ex-wife's back while the father shook the vest's other hand and smiled and said the word traffic, and after the porch came the drive west in the dark, where the ring would come out of the console somewhere past the Eisenhower Tunnel and go back on his finger, and then the parking garage would come, and the apartment, and the boy's bed made tight for two weeks.

The pie case turned through cherry, apple, and lemon meringue, and the meringue stood up in peaks too perfect for any oven.

He could order pie. He could sit in this neon warmth and let his son hum Sinatra wrong and taste that burger one more time.

"Always have pie, sweetheart." Connie's smile had come out of the same die as the one at the door. It had the same width of lip, the same teeth, and the same crinkles at the corners, and all of it looked set in wax. "The cherry's fresh. Holden baked it this morning."

"We need to go."

"Oh, don't rush off." Connie set her hand on the table. Her red nails had no chips, no wear, and no ridge of new growth at the cuticle. "The highway gets so dark this time of night. It's so easy to get turned around."

"We have GPS."

The blue drained out of her eyes like a screen losing its backlight. She said the letters back to him one at a time, and each one came out of her like a stone she was spitting into her palm. Then the color flooded back. "Well, whatever that is, the highway gets so dark this time of night. It's so easy to get turned around."

The boy looked from one of them to the other. "Dad, what's happening?"

"Bring us the check, please."

"Stay for pie." Connie leaned closer. The diner kept up its noise around her. The same voices went around, and forks clinked on plates where nothing got eaten. "Holden's cherry is famous clear to Grand Junction. Everyone stays for pie."

"We're leaving." The father stood, and his thighs hit the edge of the table. Coffee slopped over the rim of his mug and spread across the Formica.

Connie did not step aside. With her order pad on her hip, she stood in the middle of the aisle like a tollbooth.

"Holden makes the best pie. He's been making it since..." Her hand rose to her temple, and her fingers pressed into the skin there, and a crease cut in between her eyebrows. "When did we open? It feels like yesterday. It feels like forever. I was only stopping for a slice." Her fingers dug in harder. "The days all run together."

The jukebox skipped, and Sinatra hit the same word and slid back and hit it again, and every time he slid, the needle went skrrtch.

"Move."

Every head in the diner turned toward him at once. The teenage couple turned, and the man at the counter, and the family with the chicken, and the cook in the window. They turned like figures on a clock tower striking the hour. Their faces wore pleasant expressions. Their eyes glowed like motel signs that said VACANCY.

The boy's fork stopped halfway to his mouth. He looked at the faces, and at his father, and back at his plate. He took the bite.

Connie smiled down at him. "Pie's on the house. Everything's on the house if you stay."

The father pulled a twenty out of his wallet and dropped it into the spilled coffee on the table.

Connie lifted the bill. She held it at arm's length between her thumb and forefinger. She held it like a photograph of somebody she had lost track of. She turned it over and ran her thumb across the watermark, and across the security strip, and across the words SERIES 2017 A printed beside Jackson's face.

She folded it into a small square, tucked it into her apron pocket, and pressed the fabric flat over it.

"Thank you." It came out of her as a whisper.

Her hand closed around his wrist. Her grip was warm, and her fingers found the groove where his pulse lived, and her own pulse hammered back against his skin like a watch still ticking on a dead man's wrist.

"Get your boy out of here."

She let go of him and straightened and gave the hem of her uniform one hard tug, and the smile snapped back, and her voice carried to every corner of the room.

"You folks drive safe now!"

The father took the boy by the arm with the grip he used in airports and in the parking lot outside the mediator's office.

"Dad, wait—"

"Walk."

They walked past the counter, where the man turned his page again under his ruled line of smoke, and past the family, where the little girl held her whole drumstick in the air, and on toward the door.

He looked back once.

Connie stood behind the counter now, though he had not seen her cross the room. Her hands pressed flat on the Formica, and the tendons stood up in her wrists. The smile ran down her face like wet paint. Her eyes burned above it.

Her lips shaped two words at him. "Please go."

Outside, the air was thin and cold and smelled of pine resin and exhaust and nothing cooking. The BMW's lights flashed when he hit the remote. His hand missed the door handle and caught it on the next grab, and the metal was January-cold on a night in June and bit into his palm.

They got in. The engine caught. The vents pushed air that smelled of leather and the boy's shampoo. He hit the lock button, and every door answered at once.

Chunk.

"Dad, are we in trouble?"

"Put your seatbelt on."

He pulled out, and the gravel popped under the tires. In the mirror, Holden's shrank. The neon pulsed pink-red over a white uniform in the doorway, and a hand swung side to side through the same arc and paused at the same place at each end.

The trees closed, and the diner went out behind the pines.

"I left my Switch." The boy's hand shot to his pocket, and then he patted the seat beside him. "It's in the booth."

The father checked the rearview. The mirror showed trees and road and a dark that looked poured between the trunks. No pink light rose over the canopy.

"It's not there anymore."

"What do you mean? Just turn around."

"Look behind us and tell me what you see."

The boy twisted around in his seat and pressed his face to the rear window. His breath fogged a circle on the glass. He stayed there long enough for the circle to fade and fog again.

When he turned back, the grin was gone. He wore the face he had worn the afternoon his mother told him about Denver and the new house and how it was going to be an adventure.

"I left my Switch." The words came out with no weight in them. His thumb went to the skin beside his index nail and worked at it until a bead of blood came up.

The father reached across the console and put his hand on the boy's knee. The boy laid his own hand on top of it.

The Garmin lit up on the windshield, and its screen read RECALCULATING. The map came up on I-70, forty-five minutes from Denver. The dashboard clock read 11:18.

They had pulled into the lot at 7:40, and the meal had taken the time a meal takes. The father ran his tongue over his lip and tasted pickle juice. The boy's chin still shone with syrup.

The phone buzzed and jumped in the cupholder, and it kept jumping while three hours of calls and messages came through at once. Missed calls from HOME filled the lock screen. The top message read, "Where are you? Call me now."

He turned the phone face down. He would say traffic. He had been saying traffic on that porch for three years.

"That was a real place, right, Dad?"

The father's throat clicked.

The Garmin's screen went from blue to black to static, and then a red came up in it so deep it pushed out through the glass and throbbed. The screen read HOLDEN'S DINER, 0.1 MI.

His foot found the brake, and the ABS brrrrapped up through the pedal, and the tires barked, and the road went from asphalt to gravel under them while the wheel jerked in his hands and the headlights swept across pine trunks and then across chrome.

It was the same lot and the same gravel. The turquoise Chevy and the maroon Hudson sat where they had sat, and the cold night had left no dew on either hood. The chrome threw their headlights back in flat white sheets.

Everything inside had stopped where it stood. Through the windows, the teenage couple leaned forehead to forehead over their straws, the man at the counter held his page half turned under his ruled line of smoke, and the cook stood in the pass-through with his spatula raised in the bright light. No sound reached them through the glass.

The boy's seatbelt zipped back into its reel. "We're back. I can get my Switch."

The father's hands stayed on the wheel, and the wheel pressed his wedding ring into his finger.

Only Connie moved. She stood at their booth with the coffee pot and poured, and the stream fell in a straight brown line into his mug, and the mug did not fill. Her other hand lay flat over the twenty in her apron pocket. Their plates sat where they had left them. Steam stood over both plates in lines as straight as the smoke at the counter. The boy's Switch lay on the red vinyl where he had left it, and its screen was still lit.

Connie looked up through the window and smiled at him. It was a new smile. It sat crooked on her face and showed a chipped front tooth.

The boy's hand closed on the door handle. "Come on, Dad. Our food's getting cold."

The boy's door swung open. The dome light came on over both of them, and the car filled with coffee and bacon and onions going brown on a griddle, and Connie stood at the pie case now and lifted the cherry out of it and set it on the counter, and the father's hand came off the wheel.