Sig Aasen washed pots at the Anchor Light for three years and lived over the kitchen with a pan under the leak, and every month he wrote to the congressman's office, in a slow square hand that Duncan typed up on Ilda's old Royal, about the men who had sailed the Murmansk run with no guns and no medals and come home to nothing. The answers never said anything. In 1988, after a lawsuit in Washington, the government finally declared that the merchant seamen of the Second World War had been veterans all along, and Duncan read it in the Daily Breeze on the window stool, and put the paper down, and looked at the channel for a long time.
But all of that was later.
On the Sunday after the hearing Duncan let himself into the Anchor Light in the afternoon, when it was closed, and made two plates of pot roast from Joaquim Amaral's card in the coffee can over the range, with carrots and onions and little red potatoes and the gravy thick. He wrapped them in foil. He set one in front of Sig at the window stool and sat beside him while he ate it. Then he carried the other out to the Datsun and drove up the hill in the late gray light to the street of stucco houses and fig trees, where the Perovich family still lived that winter, with the bank's letters stacking up on the hall table.
He did not knock. He set the plate on the front step, on the mat, where Katica had sat with her library book, and stood for a moment looking at the closed door and the curtained window with the lamp on behind it, and then he went back down to the car.
He came back the next Sunday with another plate, and found the first plate on the step, washed and dried, with the foil folded into a neat square and laid on top of it. Nothing else. No note. He picked it up and set the new plate down in its place and went home.
He did that for a long time and did not count the Sundays. Some weeks the plate came back with the foil folded. Some weeks it came back with a few fritule on it in a paper napkin. One week in February it was still on the step where he had left it, cold and untouched, and he stood looking at it a while, and then took it home and ate it himself, standing at the window over the bakery, and the next Sunday he went back.
He never found out which of them took the plates in. He thought about his father on that drive, with the plate warm on the seat beside him and the horn going out at Angels Gate. He thought of him in a hallway on Beacon Street with his supper going cold in his hands, and the door not opened yet, and knocking anyway. He thought that was probably the whole of it. You told the truth in a room, all of it, your own part too, and then you made a plate for the man you'd told it about, and carried it up the hill, and you didn't get to know how it came out. You set it down and came back next week.
In March, on the anniversary, the door opened while he was still on the step.
It was Branko. He stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and looked at Duncan, and at the plate in his hands, for a long moment. Behind him, down the hall, Duncan could see the kitchen, and the lace tablecloth under its sheet of plastic, and the calendar on the wall, turned, finally, to the right month.
Branko didn't say anything. He didn't smile. He didn't step back.
But he held out his hands for the plate.