“Okay,” Lamb said. “I want you to pick out what you want, and order two of them. Then dessert.”
“I’m not that big a pig.”
“Yes, you are.”
“What are you having?”
“Chicken-fried chicken.”
“Me too.”
“No mind of her own?”
“I’ve never tried it before.”
“Oh, I see. Wants to try new things, does she?”
“So?”
“I’m just teasing you, dear. I think it’s a fine choice. Know why?”
“Why.”
“It was my choice.”
By the time they left the diner it was early evening, chilly. They passed a bar with the outline of a neon cowboy on horseback swinging a rope, the red green yellow and electric blue light brightening against the failed day.
At the Safeway they bought a can of red chili beans, a can of ranch beans, a can of pinto beans. A dozen cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew; little paper-wrapped cans of potted meat; a dozen flat paper-wrapped cans of sardines; raisins and jack cheese. Sliced bread; a jar of peanut butter; two pounds of bacon and three dozen eggs; a two-liter glass bottle of brown whiskey; apple juice and tomato juice. Matches. Soap. Powdered milk. Powdered cocoa. Instant coffee. Potato Buds. Shampoo and toothpaste.
“You use an adult toothbrush?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He put two in the cart. “You floss?”
“Not so much.” He threw in two wheels of waxed, mint-flavored floss. “You’re going to use both of those before you leave.”
“That’s a lot.”
“We’re going to start you on some good habits.”
“Are we staying for two years? Because we’re buying enough.”
“Oh, we are not. This is called preparation. This is called planning ahead. This is making sure you have everything you need and then some.”
“Okay.”
“It’s for your sake.”
“Okay.”
“If nothing else we’ll send you home with a bunch of loot, right? What else do we need? Did we get cashews? Are you over the cashews?”
“I’m over the cashews.”
“Good.”
They loaded up outside in the dark, and a mile down the road Lamb stopped again in front of another painted window. “One more stop.”
He led Tommie, teeth-chattering and hugging herself in her yellow sweater, into the Sportsman’s Paradise. It was faced with rough unfinished planks of dark wood, and just outside the door a plastic man with a plastic beard in a real red-and-black checked shirt held a plastic shotgun in one hand, a plastic fishing pole with reel line in the other.
“Are we going to buy a gun?”
He raised an eyebrow. “We’re here for shoes, stupid.”
“Hey.”
“Well, come on.” He nodded at her feet. “What are those? Did you think those were shoes? Who bought you those? Did your mother buy you those nine years ago?” He held open the door. “Put them both together and you don’t even have a third of a shoe.”
Small bells hitched to the glass door rang as they stepped in, and the store was warm and quiet. It smelled like rubber and pipe tobacco, was crowded with cardboard boxes of shoes and carousels of shirts and sweaters and jackets. Basketball hoops hung from the rafters, a line of fishing poles from the front doors halfway to the back. The brown-carpeted floor sloped beneath their feet. In the front, a man in glasses stood behind a glass counter filled with knives. He regarded them without expression, offering no greeting. Tommie followed Lamb, who took giant steps and walked brusquely to the back, promptly lifted a beige boot with yellow laces and blue rubber bottoms and waved it at the skinny pimple-faced kid in a brown vest with a white name tag that read: CLARE.
“That’s a name,” Lamb said. “You know that? You don’t hear that kind of name anymore.”
The boy reddened. “It’s my grandfather’s name.”
“That’s sweet. Listen, Clare. My daughter is going to need a pair of these good-looking boots in”—he looked again at her feet—“a seven.”
“That’s a boy’s shoe.”
“Well, do the conversion.”
Clare held up the boot and looked at the girl, who nodded and shrugged. He set the boot on the counter and disappeared behind hunter-orange curtains.
“So am I your daughter or your niece?”
Lamb turned over the display boot and knocked its blue rubber bottom. “That’s a good solid boot.”
“Sure.”
“You don’t like them?”
“They’re good. I like them. I never had a boy’s boot before.”
“They make boys’ shoes better.”
“Oh.”
Clare came back with the boots and Lamb took the box.
“You don’t want to try those on?”
“They’ll be fine. What she needs now, Clare, is something to cover herself up. Don’t you agree?”
Clare looked at the girl and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Women and girls,” he said and pointed toward the front of the store.
“Boys?”
Clare blinked and pointed to the right.
Lamb led the way. “Okay, Miss Piggy. Pick out a jacket.”
“Why boys?”
“They make all the boys’ clothes sturdier, especially this kind of gear. Does that bother you?”
She shrugged. While she looked, Lamb selected matching zero-degree mummy bags, wool socks, boys’ long underwear, and a guidebook on North American trees. He bought her fleece-lined mittens and a mess kit and a thermos and a backpack. Things a kid in Lombard wouldn’t have. Things she deserved to have.
“You’re going to have a lot of new stuff to bring back with you.”
“I know.”
“Lucky girl.”
“I know.”
He bought cartridges for a .16 and pretied flies in a box. At the glass counter in the front, the skinny clerk with gray hair and pockmarks was reading a magazine, the cover pressed open on the glass case. He looked at the flies, then ran his gaze up and down Lamb, resting it upon his bruised cheekbone, then to the girl, his face unchanging. Without taking his eyes off her he asked Lamb if he didn’t want any knives. His teeth were gray.
“Knives,” Lamb said. “Do we need any knives, Em?”
“What would we want a knife for?”
The man behind the counter looked at her. “Don’t your daddy take you fishing?”
She shook her head and grinned. “Not yet.”
“Hunting?”
“Nope.”
He looked out the window at Lamb’s truck. “When you get out of that vehicle, and get out on the river, or up in the mountains, you’ll need a knife.” The clerk looked at him. “Won’t she?” He took a shining silver knife with a five-inch blade out of the case and handed it to the girl, handle first.
Lamb looked at her. “I don’t know. I think your mother would kill me.”
Tommie shrugged. “She won’t care.”
Lamb looked from the girl to the man behind the counter and into the glass. “You don’t have a good knife do you, Em.”
The clerk retrieved the first knife and picked up another. “Maybe you want a skinning knife.”
“Something practical,” Lamb said. “Something she can fold up and keep in the coin pocket of her jeans.”
“Like for an emergency?” The clerk asked, splaying his open palms upon the glass.
“Yes,” he said, “like that.”
The clerk nodded at the case. “Go ahead and look.”
Lamb looked the man in the eye. “Why don’t you give us the most expensive one you have in there.” The man slid open the glass doors and selected a tiny bone-handled pocketknife. Reaching over the counter, he nodded at the girl, who opened her palm. He set it in her hand.
“That’s one twenty.”
She weighed it in her hand—surprisingly heavy for its size. They both had the same thought: like the pencil sharpener. She nodded at Lamb, and the clerk pointed his eyes at the girl’s pockets.