If Walt had wanted to be especially polite, he might have softened me up with a little left jab or a rabbit punch to the gut. Walt Butterfield wasn’t much for pleasantries. He led with all of his best, a right fist launched as if it had come out of a missile silo. He intended every knuckle to connect with every part of my face from my chin to my forehead. The pain radiated from my nose through my jaw. The damage might have been worse if some instinct in me hadn’t half expected it. My head was turned to the side an inch before the punch landed, or my nose would have been as flat as last week’s roadkill.

He was ready with another swing. He glanced down at the floor. That was where he expected me to be. He was momentarily annoyed to see me in front of him, wobbling but still upright. He bounced a left off my shoulder. This bought him the time he needed to bring his right elbow up under my jaw. A left reappeared out of nowhere and tagged me on my right ear. The earlobe popped like a water balloon full of blood. I went down so fast I didn’t even stagger.

Walt stood over me. His fists quivered at his sides. He kicked me three times with the steel-toed tip of a motorcycle boot. A little too hard for my taste.

“She’s not for you,” he said, before placing a fourth and even harder kick, this one aimed for my left kidney.

The ear I could hear out of was ringing. I heard him loud and clear. He almost had a grin on his face. The exertion released beads of sweat that plastered some strands of white hair to his forehead. “Did you hear me?”

I mumbled incoherently and tried gamely to raise myself up on my elbows, failed, and fell back down. Walt hunched over me with his face just inches from mine, or what was left of it. He began to ask me again if I understood. I snapped my head up into his mouth. The impact loosened his teeth and tore part of his upper lip into a jagged flap. It was his turn to land on his ass.

I stood up and spit blood on his perfect floor. I liked to think I jumped to my feet. The truth is, I rolled like an amputee turtle.

“I didn’t quite get that, Walt,” I said. “Tell me again.”

Walt almost did jump to his feet. It was demoralizing. He began to throw wild punches one after another. They were easy to deflect, though at great expense to the bones in my arms. I calmly and charitably asked him if he’d like to take a little rest. It had the effect I wanted. The next flurry of punches sapped his strength. He had trouble holding his fists up. The motorcycle boots he wore were spit-shined. I had a good look at the right one when he surprised me with a kick at my groin. It was only a surprise because I thought he’d have tried it sooner. I pivoted. All he got was leg.

At that point I could have just pushed him over like a cheap toy. I didn’t want to do that to him. I made a big mistake. I did nothing. With his last ounce of strength he brought the heel of his right boot down on my left foot. I saw it coming out of my one good eye. I was too late. I thought I could hear my toes breaking like dry chicken bones. I returned the favor by driving my heel onto Walt’s right instep, where his boots provided the least protection. The reflex bent him forward, head down, just as my aching right fist came up to meet his chin. His dentures flew out of his mouth and skittered across the floor. I thought he was tracking them as they went. It turned out to be his eyes rolling back in his head. Walt was down. I hoped out.

I wasn’t going to make the same mistake he’d made with me. I kept my distance. Walt was out for less than a minute. The dirt he had knocked off and out of me combined with our blood to make a dark, slippery mud on the linoleum floor. I waited and listened. His breathing was steady and not labored. I resisted the urge to go check on him.

His face looked shrunken without his teeth. Somehow, though, even without Claire in the room, he looked younger and almost happy with his gray tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. I would have bet Walt looked better on his back than I did standing.

His eyes snapped open. He got himself upright. For a long minute he stared at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. Truth be told, it could have gone either way. I sat down on one of the stools and propped an elbow on the counter to keep from falling off. One of us needed to say something. I knew it wouldn’t be Walt.

“She’s not your daughter,” I said.

Walt took a slow inventory and made sure he was still in working order. He felt his face and stretched his neck as if the previous few minutes had involved nothing more strenuous than a morning shave. When he bent over to retrieve his dentures, he turned his head away before slipping them inside his mouth. It was an odd bit of vanity. He was a vain man. Over the years I’d known him he seemed to grow more vain. It wasn’t a garden-variety vanity. Walt’s vanity was constant and intense as a coal-fired furnace, fueled by sheer willpower to vanquish change. He was determined to keep not only himself but the diner as it always had been—as it was when Bernice was alive.

“No,” he answered. “She’s not my daughter. But she’s as much of her mother as I will ever have again. Good night.”

Walt flipped the switches for the overheads and walked into the kitchen without the smallest hitch in his giddyap. The kitchen lights went out. The door of his apartment shut. I sat in the dark diner. At the far end of the room the neon of the jukebox still buzzed, spelling out the words Today’s Hit Parade in pink and purple.

The longer I sat on the stool the more I began to hurt and the less I felt like moving. The headlights of a single car swept over the drawn blinds. Claire had said it was less than a mile from the diner to her house. There didn’t seem to be much purpose in the ruse of driving my truck. The kicks and punches I had taken were working their magic. I had some doubt that I would be able to get up into the cab and still more doubt that I could move my arms and legs well enough to drive.

It didn’t seem urgent to tell Claire about Josh, though it did seem important. There was a clock running on his adventure. I was also morbidly curious to see if I could walk that far. Maybe Josh and I would both end up sleeping in the desert. The way things had turned out, I was certain his night would be the more comfortable.