The healer [antikvár]

imothy Wakelin, age thirty-two, pale features handsome or weak, it was hard to tell, fine dark hair thinning, widower food stains down the front of his blue cotton turtleneck, sat, dismayed and receiving looks, along a rear wall in the single chair at a table for two in the Grant Gemboree, a bus-stop café in the mining town of Grant. It was lunchtime on a hot weekday in late June. Outside, through layers of smoke, blue and enfolded, pickup trucks slowly passed. Inside, the place was jammed. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody except the stranger had a cigarette going. A din of talk, shouts, horseplay. Clattering cudery and banging dishes. The name tag of the waitress—not Wakelins own waitress but the one who had taken away the other chair írom his table—said Ardis, and he was watching her closely because he knew that this was the name of the healer s mother, and it did not strike him as a common name, unless it was common around here. Ardis was a tali woman, five-eight (Wakelin guessed) in flat heels. In adolescence she must have enjoyed the attractiveness of a cherub or an animal cub. Wakelin saw cheeks once rosy with new powers, but those powers, with the booze and the cigarettes, in middle age were swollen with disappointment, the cheeks pouchy, the bleached hair pinned up like Straw, eyes dark-ringed and guarded. She did not look like the mother of a saint. Two other things Wakelin noticed. One, makeup intended to cover an area of bruising down the left side of Ardis s face. Two, the red-rimmed eyes of a dog—an old black Lab lying by the door, dewlaps outspread on the