At seven the town came to supper.
They came in twos and threes out of the dark, stamping on the porch, hanging their coats on the hooks by the door. A man in paint-spattered overalls. Two women in quilted vests. A young couple with a baby in a sling. A boy of nine or ten. Jake, with his silver pendant. Earl last, slow on a cane. Twenty-five people filling the red booths and the counter stools, calling hello to Mae, nodding at the strangers, making room.
They were filthy. Hassan saw it as they took off their coats. Dirt packed into the creases of their knuckles and black under their nails. Dirt ground into the knees of their jeans, on the young mother's skirt, in the baby's fine hair. The man in the overalls had a clot of earth behind one ear. Nobody washed. They sat down as they were and reached for the bread.
"Don't mind them," Mae said, coming by with a stack of bowls. "They've been working the fields all day. Last of the potatoes before the ground freezes."
Dana had her phone out. "Do you mind? For the show. People like small towns."
"Take all you want, hon. We're not shy."
Dana walked the length of the long table photographing faces, and the faces smiled for her, every one.
Hassan went upstairs. "I'll pray first," he told Adam. "Wait for me. We'll eat together, from the pack."
Adam nodded.
The room faced south over the playa. Hassan opened the compass on the windowsill. The needle wouldn't settle. It leaned toward the floor, toward the voices below, and swung back, and leaned again. He turned the dial anyway, and the arrow for Mecca came to rest on the wall behind the iron bed, north and a little east, where it had pointed all week. He laid his jacket in the only clear space and prayed the night prayer with his forehead a foot from the wallpaper, and through the floorboards he heard spoons on china, and laughter.
Then a scream, Dana's, and a chair going over.
He finished the prayer. He made himself finish it. Then he took the stairs two at a time.
Dana stood in the middle of the diner with her arms around a young man in a gray hoodie. It took Hassan a second. Korean American, soft face, black hair stuck to his forehead.
Theo.
"Where were you?" Dana was saying into his shoulder. "Where were you?"
"Earl found him on the playa this morning," Mae said, a hand on her chest. "Wandering. He'd had a knock on the head, poor lamb. Didn't know his own name till noon."
Theo stood inside Dana's arms with his own at his sides. When she let go he looked at her face as if he were reading it.
"Hi," he said. "Ma'am."
"Ma'am?" Her laugh broke in the middle. "Theo. It's me."
"Dana," Theo said, carefully, the way you say a word in a language you're learning. Then he smiled, and it was Theo's smile, exactly.
He sat where Mae put him and ate the stew with his fingers.
Adam sat at the end of a booth with an empty plate in front of him. There were crumbs on it. Yellow crumbs.
He saw his father's face and went red. "It was just bread. Dad. She said there's nothing in it."
"I asked you to wait."
"I've been eating lentils for four days. I'm fifteen. I'm hungry."
Hassan sat down across from him. He was angry and he was frightened and he couldn't tell which was which. It was cornbread. It was a boy eating bread his father had told him not to eat, the oldest story in the world.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
They ate cold lentils from the pouches while the town had its supper around them. Spoons went up and down the long table. Bowls went into the kitchen and came out again, steaming.
Mae came by with the coffee pot and clucked at the empty pouches. "That's no supper for a growing boy," she said, and touched Adam's hair, lightly, the way a grandmother would. Adam ducked his head, pleased. Then she bent over him. She put her face down close to the crown of his head and breathed in, slow and long, the way you breathe over a pot on the stove to see if it's ready. Her eyes closed. When she straightened her cheeks had color in them.
Hassan felt the hair rise on his arms. He smiled at her and said thank you, they were fine.
Caleb had three bowls. The man who had been too sick for a protein bar on the ridge sat at the counter with his elbows out and his spoon going, and each time he held a bowl out, Mae took it back to the kitchen, smiling, and brought him a fresh one. Wes sat two stools down from him with a cup of coffee he didn't drink and watched him do it.
Across the room Dana crouched by Theo's chair. "Come upstairs. You can have my bed."
"I'm fine here," Theo said, and licked his fingers.
Dana came back to the booth and sat beside Hassan. She kept her eyes on Theo. "He's concussed," she said. "That's all this is. I did an episode with a neurologist. You get a hard knock and your personality goes somewhere for a while. Then it comes back." She said it the way you'd lay a board across a hole. "He'll come back to himself. A couple of days."
"He's eating meat."
"I know." Her jaw tightened. "I know he is." She looked over at the counter. "Caleb's on his third. Except she keeps taking them back full. I watched. He stirs it and she swaps it." She rubbed her eyes. "I don't know. Head injuries. Everybody's weird tonight."
Hassan looked at Theo's feet. Theo had gone down to the creek in white sneakers; Hassan remembered them in the firelight. He was wearing brown leather boots now, laced to the top, laced tight.
Then he looked at everyone else's.
Every person in the room who lived in Sweetwater wore high leather boots, laced to the top and knotted at the shin. The young mother. The boy, who couldn't have been ten. Nobody had a foot crossed over a knee. Nobody had kicked off a shoe under the table, the way people do in a warm room after a long day in a field.
In ranch country people wore boots. He told himself that.
Earl got up to leave, and Theo stood up with him, as if a string had pulled him. Dana half rose. "He'll bunk at my place tonight," Earl said to her kindly. "Quiet house. Do him good."
They came down the aisle past Hassan's booth, the old man and the young one, and Hassan listened to Earl's steps on the pine boards. The cane: a dull knock. Then the foot: a hard, small, double click, like two knuckles rapping wood. The cane. The doubled click.
Hassan had heard that sound four nights ago, on the rock above his tent.
He went out the back.
The kitchen door gave onto a yard with a woodpile, a clothesline, and a long galvanized trough fed by a pipe from the spring. Hassan put his headlamp on red and crouched.
The mud around the trough was churned with prints. Small, split, sunk deep, the size of a teacup, two crescents facing each other. They stood in pairs side by side, the way a person stands to lean over a basin and wash. The same prints that had come down the slope to his tent and stood listening.
There were no cattle in Sweetwater. He hadn't seen a cow, a goat, a sheep, anything with a split hoof, since they came in.
The kitchen door opened behind him and he stood up too fast. It was Dana. She came across the yard with her arms wrapped around herself and looked down at the mud in the red light.
"Deer?"
"No."
She didn't argue. She held out her phone. It was the bottom of the board, the tea-colored poster, the woman's face enlarged until it filled the screen.
It was Mae. The same round face, the same white scar through the left eyebrow, the same crooked front tooth. Fifty-five years ago, and she hadn't been young then either.
"I thought her mother," Dana said. "A family thing. Then I looked at the scar." Her voice was steady and her hands were shaking. "What are these people?"
From inside came a burst of laughter and Mae's voice calling, "Who wants pie?"
"I don't know," Hassan said. "But one of them stood outside my tent the first night and listened to my son answer."