"Your father used to do that," she said.
Duncan was refilling the napkin dispensers. He did not stop. "Do what."
"Buy two plates. When Joaquim had the place on Beacon Street, before they tore it down. Your father would come in and buy his supper and then buy another one, to go, every Sunday, and carry it out wrapped in foil." She shrugged. "I don't know who it was for. I never asked him. You didn't ask Thurman Whitfield things."
"No," Duncan said. "You didn't."
She looked at him a moment longer, and he could feel her wanting to say something else, and deciding not to, and then she went back into the kitchen and he heard her bang a pot down on the range harder than she needed to.
He finished the napkins. He did not think about his father. He had gotten very good, over nine years, at not thinking about his father, the same way you got good at not putting weight on a bad ankle. You could go a long time that way. You could go almost forever, if nobody kicked it.
The old man finished his fish and chips and wiped the plate with the last of the bread and folded his paper napkin into a small square and put it in the middle of the plate, the way men do who have eaten a long time in a ship's mess. He never said thank you for the food. He said thank you for the coffee, every day, in a way that made it clear he meant everything.
"I'm Sig," he said that day, when Duncan took the plate. It was the first time he had offered anything. "Sig Aasen."
"Duncan."
"Duncan." He seemed to taste it. "Scotch."
"My mother's father."
Sig nodded as if that settled something, and turned back to the window. A boat was going by in the slice of channel, a small wooden purse seiner with a turntable on the stern and a big black net piled on it, heading out toward the Angels Gate light. Duncan did not look at it. He had stopped looking at seiners in March.