"I guess you've been in here before," Reacher said.

"Of course I have," she giggled, like he was crazy. Two rows of tiny square teeth flashed at him. "I've been in here lots of times."

Then she jumped up and scooted sideways over the vinyl.

"Mommy, sit next to me," she said.

Carmen smiled. "I'm going to use the rest room first. I'll be right back. You stay here with Mr. Reacher, O.K.?"

The kid nodded gravely and Mr. Reacher sat himself down opposite her and they looked at each other quite openly. He wasn't sure what she was seeing, but he was seeing a living version of the photograph from her mother's wallet. Thick corn-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, incongruous dark eyes wide open and staring at him rather than at the camera's lens, a little snub of a nose, a serious mouth closed in a rather earnest way. Her skin was impossibly perfect, like pink damp velvet.

"Where did you go to school?" she asked. "Did you go here too?"

"No, I went to lots of different places," he said. "I moved around."

"You didn't go to the same school all the time?"

He shook his head. "Every few months, I went to a new one."

She concentrated hard. Didn't ask why. Just examined the proposition for its benefits and drawbacks.

"How could you remember where everything was? Like the bathrooms? You might forget who the teacher was. You might call her by the wrong name."

He shook his head again. "When you're young, you can remember stuff pretty well. It's when you get old that you start to forget things."

"I forget things," she said. "I forgot what my daddy looks like. He's in prison. But I think he's coming home soon."

"Yes, I think he is."

"Where did you go to school when you were six and a half like me?"

School, the center of her universe. He thought about it. When he was six and a half, the war in Vietnam was still well below its peak, but it was already big enough that his father was there or thereabouts at the time. So he figured that year would have been split between Guam and Manila. Manila, mostly, he thought, judging by his memories of the buildings and the vegetation, the places he hid out in and played around.

"The Philippines," he said.

"Is that in Texas too?" she asked.

"No, it's a bunch of islands between the Pacific and the South China Sea. Right out in the ocean, a long way from here."

"The ocean," she said, like she wasn't sure. "Is the ocean in America?"

"Is there a map on the wall in your school?"

"Yes, there is. A map of the whole world."

"O.K., the oceans are all the blue parts."

"There's a lot of blue parts."

He nodded. "That's for sure."

"My mom went to school in California."

"That'll be on the map, too. Find Texas and look to the left."

He saw her looking down at her hands, trying to remember which was left and which was right. Then he saw her look up beyond his shoulder, and he turned to see Carmen on her way back, trapped temporarily by the sales people getting up out of their booth. She waited until they had moved to the door and cleared the aisle and then she skipped back and sat down, all in one graceful movement. She pressed close to Ellie and hugged her one-armed and tickled her and got a squeal in exchange. The waitress finished with the sales people at the register and walked over, pad and pencil at the ready.

"Three Coke floats, please," Ellie said, loud and clear.

The waitress wrote it down.

"Coming right up, honey," she said, and walked away.

"Is that O.K. for you?" Carmen asked.

Reacher nodded. Like the smell of elementary school, he remembered the taste of a Coke float. He'd had his first ever in a PX canteen in Berlin, in a long low Quonset hut left over from the Four Powers occupation. It had been a warm summer's day in Europe, no air conditioning, and he remembered the heat on his skin and the bubbles in his nose.

"It's silly," Ellie said. "It's not the Coke that floats. It's the ice cream that floats in the Coke. They should call them ice cream floats."

Reacher smiled. He recalled thinking the same sorts of things, when he was her age. Outraged puzzlement at the illogicalities of the world he was being asked to join.

"Like elementary school," he said. "I found out that elementary means easy. So 'elementary school' means 'easy school.' I remember thinking, well, it seems pretty hard to me. 'Hard school' would be a better name."

Ellie looked at him, seriously.

"I don't think it's hard," she said. "But maybe it's harder in the ocean."

"Or maybe you're smarter than me."

She thought about it, earnestly.

"I'm smarter than some people," she said. "Like Peggy. She's still on the three-letter words. And she thinks you spell zoo with a Z."

Reacher had no answer to that. He waited for Carmen to pick it up, but before she could the waitress arrived back with a tin tray with three tall glasses on it. She put them on the table with great ceremony and whispered "Enjoy''' to Ellie and backed away. But the glasses were almost a foot tall, and the drinking straws added another six inches, and Ellie's chin was about level with the table top, so her mouth was a long way from where it needed to be.

"You want me to hold it down?" Carmen asked her. "Or do you want to kneel up?"

Ellie thought about it. Reacher was starting to wonder if this kid ever made a quick, easy decision. He saw a little of himself in her. He had taken things too seriously. The kids in every new school had made fun of him for it. But usually only once.

"I'll kneel up," she said.

It was more than kneeling. She stood on the vinyl bench in a kind of crouch, with her hands planted palms-down on the table around the base of the glass, and her head ducked to the straw. As good a method as any, Reacher figured. She started sucking her drink and he turned to look at his own. The ice cream was a round greasy spoonful. He found the cola way too sweet, like it was mixed from syrup in the wrong proportions. The bubbles were huge and artificial. It tasted awful. A long way from a childhood summer's day in Germany.

"Don't you like it?" Ellie asked. Her mouth was full, and she sprayed a little of the mixture onto his sleeve.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're making a funny face."

"Too sweet," he said. "It'll rot my teeth. Yours, too."

She came up with a huge grimace, like she was showing her teeth to a dentist.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "They're all going to fall out anyway. Peggy's got two out already."

Then she bent back to her straw and vacuumed up the rest of the drink. She poked at the sludge in the bottom of the glass with her straw until it was liquid enough to suck.

"I'll finish yours, too, if you want," she said.

"No," her mother said back. "You'll throw up in the car."

"I won't. I promise."

"No," Carmen said again. "Now go to the bathroom, O.K.? It's a long way home."

"I went already," Ellie said. "We always go at school, last thing. We line up. We have to. The bus driver hates it if we pee on the seats." Then she laughed delightedly.

"Ellie," her mother said.

"Sorry, Mommy. But it's only the boys who do that. I wouldn't do it."

"Go again anyway, O.K.?"

Ellie rolled her eyes theatrically and clambered over her mother's lap and ran to the back of the diner.

Reacher put a five over the check. "Great kid," he said.

"I think so," Carmen said. "Well, most of the time."

"Smart as anything."

She nodded. "Smarter than me, that's for sure."

He let that one go, too. Just sat in silence and watched her eyes cloud over.

"Thanks for the sodas," she said.

He shrugged. "My pleasure. And a new experience. I don't think I've ever bought a soda for a kid before."

"So you don't have any of your own, obviously."