My heart missed a beat or two as my eyes settled on the old Wurlitzer jukebox against the far wall. Only a handful of months earlier, on a spring evening in late May, I’d come upon Walt and Claire dancing in front of that jukebox. I just stood there as I had that night and watched them dance the tender never-ending dance between a father and daughter, though neither one ever acknowledged that blood connection.

For me, the diner held them unchanged just as surely as it enfolded the tables and chairs, the lone ticket from the last meal prepared for a paying guest in 1987 and, I supposed, also Claire’s mother, Bernice, her rape and gradual mute death along with Walt’s grisly vengeance. In its own way, The Never-Open Desert Diner was always open, if only to memories and ghosts.

I’d seen Walt the previous day, a Sunday and the last day of September. I was working at the solitary house in Desert Home and tending to the graves in the little grotto nestled into the hillside behind the house. It was still summer and hot, with no sign cold had ever touched the parched ground or that it ever would again. The sky was a deep yawning blue and cloudless all the way to the red mesa.

Desert Home was an abandoned housing development a mile down the road from the diner. It had once been Bernice’s dream, and that dream died with her in 1972. The modest model home was the only structure ever built in Desert Home, though the empty, sand-swept streets were there and continued to make promises. Walt had given the house to Claire and me when he thought, and I hoped, we would be married. After Claire died I began maintaining it even though no one lived there and probably never would.

I worked hard all day on the house and graves with the sun pounding me. When I took a break to wipe the sweat from my eyes I searched the horizon for the imaginary sound of Claire’s cello or her smile and listened for her voice calling after me as I trudged up the slope toward the arched entrance. I sometimes sat on the porch in the green chair and squinted at the wind in the eaves of the house and heard only what one ghost might whisper to another.

Late in the afternoon I stood with my back to the grotto and watched as the trail of dust and sand cut like a rusty scratch across the roadless beige expanse to the south. No sound, only the bleeding powdery line that marked the motorcycle’s steady path toward me. I knew Walt would veer away at the last moment just as he had for the past few months. It wasn’t just me he was avoiding; it was the house and the graves—Claire’s grave, Bernice’s grave. He might have dodged the desert itself, the desert all three of them loved, if he could have. Eventually, he angled away and took the back way to Utah 117 and his eternally closed roadside diner. How long I stood there afterward I couldn’t have said. Walt had long since disappeared when the iron shadows of approaching dusk began their creeping journey across the desert floor.

Belle began to squirm in her car seat to remind me she was there. The powdery snow had been swept off the wide flagstone patio separating the rear of the diner from the Quonset. I knocked on the Quonset door only once. Knocking twice was overdoing it in Walt’s opinion. My jaw still ached on occasion from the last time he expressed his opinion. If he wanted to come to the door he would come to the door. Belle and I waited as the cold continued its work.

When I turned to leave I saw something I’d never seen before. The back door to the diner was ajar. The sight startled me. A lot of things were possible. The one thing that wasn’t possible was that Walt had simply forgotten to close it.