When Rainie Pinyon split this time she didn't go south, eventhough it was October and she didn't like the winter cold. Maybe shethought that this winter she didn't deserve to be warm, or maybe shewanted to find some unfamiliar territory -- whatever. She got on thebus in Bremerton and got off it again in Boise. She hitched to SaltLake City and took a bus to Omaha. She got herself a waitressing job,using the name Ida Johnson, as usual. She quit after a week, gotanother job in Kansas City, quit after three days, and so on and so onuntil she came to a tired-looking cafe in Harmony, Illinois, a small townup on the bluffs above the Mississippi. She liked Harmony right off,because it was pretty and sad -- half the storefronts brightly paintedand cheerful, the other half streaked and stained, the windows boardedup. The kind of town that would be perfectly willing to pick up andmove into a shopping mall only nobody wanted to build one here andso they'd just have to make do. The help wanted sign in the cafewindow was so old that several generations of spiders had lived anddied on webs between the sign and the glass.

"We're a five-calendar cafe," said the pinched-up overpainted oldlady at the cash register.

Rainie looked around and sure enough, there were five calendarson the walls.

"Not just because of that Blue Highways book, either, I'll haveyou know. We already had these calendars up before he wrote hisbook. He never stopped here but he could have."

"Aren't they a little out of date?" asked Rainie.

The old lady looked at her like she was crazy.

"If you already had the calendars up when he wrote the book, Imean."

"Well, not these calendars," said the old lady. "Here's the thing,darlin'. A lot of diners and what-not put up calendars after that BlueHighways book said that was how you could tell a good restaurant.