“No.”
“You can walk through that wall?”
A smile, utter confidence. “Easy.”
“Do it, please?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You'll find out in a few hours. It's not time for you to know.”
“Dee,” he said. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
Instead of answering, she did a strange thing. She reached toward him, her hand open, passed it slowly from left to right in front of his face, looked into his eyes. “After this hour,” she said, “you will never see me again in your life on Earth. We met, no coincidence, because it's important for you to know: What's suggestion got to do with destiny? The answer will change everything you believe and everything you see.”
If there was anything she could have said to strike him dumb, that was it.
“She was right!” she said next minute, bright and happy, so disconnected a note it ran him off his tracks.
“Who was right?”
“The waitress! This is wonderful salad!”
“It is. A truly remarkable salad.” He forgot his questions about coincidence, destiny, walking through walls, reminding anybody about anything.
She pulled a notebook from her pocket, read him The Truckers Code, copied from the sun visor of that Kenworth eighteen-wheeler, her ride from North Platte:
You are the fabric that holds America together, and you are a child's best friend.
It is the trucker who delivers the farmer's crops to the grocer so children don't go hungry.
It is the trucker who carries the fuel that keeps them warm.
It is the trucker who hauls the lumber to the carpenter to build the homes that keep them safe and secure.
And it is the trucker's sacrifice of loneliness, by enduring empty nights and lonely miles, that ties America together, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
She looked up from the notebook. “Isn't that beautiful?”
The two of them talked about that, in the restaurant in Ponca City, Oklahoma, how true the words and how much we owe the ones who choose difficult dangerous work to make our lives what they are.
Dinner was over. She wished him happy flying, then Dee Hallock said good-bye, left the table, and was gone.
In his room that evening, he set his travel computer on the hotel Internet, searched her name. There were several Gwendolyn Hallocks, of course, but only one brief mention, the one he was looking for, a fragment in some genealogy site:
Samuel Black (1948–1988), stage hypnotist; m. Gwendolyn Hallock (1951–2006); daughter Jennifer (b. 1970).
The Internet gets numbers wrong all the time, it mangles quotes, it credits words to people who never said them, its facts are often fiction.
Once in a while, however, the Web manages to get it right. If that was so, Dee Hallock, with whom Jamie Forbes had just finished a fine salad, had died two years before they met.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It wasn't much of a sleep, that night.
That's why she could walk through the wall, he thought, thrashing sheets aside: she no longer accepts suggestions that she's mortal. If it weren't for miseducation, you could walk through that wall.