A busboy had come from somewhere and was helping the waitress mop up the mess. “Felt like I stepped down,” David heard her saying. Was that the kind of thing you heard in the afterlife?

“I guess I’ll go back with you,” she said, “but I’m not staying in that boring station with those boring people when this place is around.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Who’s Buck Owens?”

“I’ll tell you all about him,” David said. “Roy Clark, too. But first tell me what else you know.”

“Most of them I don’t even care about,” she said, “but Henry Lander’s nice. So’s his wife.”

“Phil Palmer’s not bad, either.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Phil the Pill.”

“What do you know, Willa?”

“You’ll see for yourself, if you really look.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if you just-”

Apparently not. She rose until her thighs pressed against the edge of the table, and pointed. “Look! The band is coming back!”

The moon was high when he and Willa walked back to the road, holding hands. David didn’t see how that could be-they had stayed for only the first two songs of the next set-but there it was, floating all the way up there in the spangled black. That was troubling, but something else troubled him even more.

“Willa,” he said, “what year is it?”

She thought it over. The wind rippled her dress as it would the dress of any live woman. “I don’t exactly remember,” she said at last. “Isn’t that odd?”

“Considering I can’t remember the last time I ate a meal or drank a glass of water? Not too odd. If you had to guess, what would you say? Quick, without thinking.”

“Nineteen…eighty-eight?”

He nodded. He would have said 1987 himself. “There was a girl in there wearing a T-shirt that said CROWHEART SPRINGS HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF ’03. And if she was old enough to be in a roadhouse-”

“Then ’03 must have been at least three years ago.”