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stopping.”
    “My pleasure,” he said.
    “We’re just going to the first hotel,” I said to the man.
    “That’d be Ann’s,” he replied. “Right next to Wall Drug.” He signaled, checked his mirror, then drove into town.
    Ann’s Motel was a small inn on Wall’s main drag, west of the Wall Drug complex. The man pulled into the motel’s parking lot and stopped his truck in front of the lobby door. I got out, then helped Pamela, holding her arm as she stepped down.
    “Thanks,” I said to the man.
    “Don’t mention it. Don’t forget your pack.”
    Pamela said, “Thank you, sir.”
    “My pleasure, ma’am,” he said kindly.
    I shut the door after Pamela and grabbed my pack from the truck’s bed. I slapped the back of the truck and the truck rattled off.
    Pamela limped over to a wood bench near the motel lobby while I went inside to check on rooms. Fortunately, the motel had vacancies and I got two rooms on the street level. There was a small, glass-door refrigerator in the lobby with beverages for sale and I bought a bottle of Gatorade. I got our keys from the clerk, then went back out to Pamela. I handed her a key and the Gatorade. “You should drink that right away. It will help.”
    “Thank you,” she said, stowing the bottle in her bag.
    “I got you a room on the main floor. One-eleven, right over there.”
    Pamela stood on her own, her bag around her shoulder. “May we talk now?”
    “Not yet,” I said. “I want you to drink that and get some rest. I’ll go see what they have to eat over at the drugstore then we’ll go to dinner later. We’ll talk then.”
    “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
    “Don’t thank me. You gave me no choice.”
    “We always have a choice,” she said.
    In light of the circumstances of our relationship I found her comment intriguing. I helped her to her room, then went to my own.
    My room was a small rectangle, furnished with two full beds with stiff mattresses and aged floral pattern comforters. After so many days without amenities, it was as welcome to me as a suite at the Four Seasons.
    I leaned my pack against the wall and flopped onto the bed. I wondered what could be so important for Pamela to say that she had risked her life to follow me. What could she possibly have to say in her own defense? Most of all, I wondered what McKale would have made of it all.
    I remember the first time I asked McKale where her mother was. I was only nine years old and had lost my own mother less than a year earlier, so the topic of mothers was one of interest to me. Especially missing ones.
    “We kicked her out,” McKale said.
    I looked at her in amazement. “Why did you do that?”
    “Me and my dad don’t want her anymore. We even threw away all her pictures so we don’t have to look at her.”
    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 anavocado 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.

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