Hattie licked her lips. It would be her truck stop's first summer. Fifty yards below her house it gleamed, an island of light in the Ruby River Valley. She had created a world bigger than the dark mountains outlined across the highway. A world as vast as the brightening sky. Seeds planted in distant soils, in arid climates and in cold ones, grew into vegetables and grains, were harvested, packed and sent in cool trucks to her address, where they nourished thousands of customers, who, in her mind's eye, became a sea of different colored bill caps bent over Coca-Colas.  Mississippi catfish slinking along muddy river bottoms, Iowa beef grazing dumbly near corrugated steel sheds, Florida oranges fluorescent against their green  foliage, crisp apples from Delaware, Kentucky raspberries so lusciously red she always wanted to plunge her hands into the containers. Her heart beat with awe at the world she had spun around her.

She tested the cup of coffee cooling on the rail. Mornings like this made her miss Oakley. The big sign over his former fields, BOHANNONS, would have pleased him. But this was not his world anymore. She drained her coffee and went inside to rouse her daughters.