The boy grabbed my leg and when I looked down at him he had that same strange grin, though his eyes told a different story. That poor little kid had seen a gun before and knew what it could do and had enough sense to be frightened. I was pretty sure Walt wasn’t going to shoot us, though with Walt you couldn’t be certain of anything. Some relationships are like that. For one thing, he was cradling the gun in his cupped palms, like water, or a wounded bird. It was an odd moment. It was the same revolver he had given to Claire to protect herself from wild animals, though we all knew he meant the kind of animals that walked on two feet—and the same gun she had returned to him the day before Dennis, her ex-husband, strangled her and took off across the desert.

Staring at the gun in his hands, Walt said, “I wonder sometimes if Claire had kept this if she’d be alive today.”

It wasn’t a question I could answer. Neither one of us were there. Probably not. It must have happened so quickly, and Claire returned it not because she was afraid of her former husband—she returned it because she was afraid of herself, her temper. She was so convinced Dennis wasn’t the violent type. I knew better. Walt knew better. Every type was the violent type given the right provocation and moment, maybe especially the ones who believed they weren’t the violent kind. Except for Walt and me, no one knew what had happened to Claire, or her cello, and up until that moment, though several months had passed, neither one of us had spoken to the other about her or even mentioned her name.

Walt put the gun back on the nightstand and took the two short steps to where I stood. Both the dog and the boy backed up. He carefully pulled the blanket back from Belle’s face and the two of them were blue eyes to blue eyes. It was almost a whisper. “You’re a fool, Ben.”

The words were out of my mouth before I knew I’d said them. “I had no choice.”

Walt didn’t respond, not that he needed to. He glanced at the boy and the dog and said, “The furnace is broken.” He pushed by us and out the back door. I heard the door to the Quonset open and close.

The furnace kicked on and blew warm air on us from a vent above our heads. I marched my little parade out of the diner and left the door open and paused for a few seconds near the door of the Quonset and considered the man behind it, the gun, the diner and the obviously functioning furnace. A few seconds was too damn long. Walt was still a mystery and some mysteries didn’t need solving, couldn’t ever be solved, and the best thing you could do was just accept them.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the dog was also staring at the Quonset door. I gently mussed Juan’s hair with my free hand and said to the dog, “You sure backed your furry ass up in a hurry.” For a moment it seemed to me the dog wore a slightly embarrassed expression before he lowered his head.

Walt and I had an unspoken agreement never to speak of Claire. That had changed and I didn’t know how I felt about it except that I didn’t want to think about it. We shared her and our loss in silence, bound by memories only the two of us had of her, and of her misleading headstone on the grave next to her mother, Bernice, less than a half mile away. Walt calling me a fool could cover a lot of territory. For years he’d been telling me driving a truck to deliver necessities to the desert rats and eccentric exiles who lived along Highway 117 was nothing more than suckling losers.