"Dodie." She said it low. "You know what you're doing? A kid that age comes all the way down here on the bus by himself, every day, to sit at a counter by himself? Something's wrong at home. Something's wrong somewhere. You ought to call somebody."
"Call who?"
"The police. The county. Somebody." She jerked her chin toward the front, where on the back of the half-gallon of chocolate milk sitting by the coffee station there was another face, another child, a boy this time, from Erie, Pennsylvania, missing since 1983. "You see the cartons. You don't know who he is. You don't know who's looking for him. Or who isn't."
"He's not on a carton," I said. "I'd know."
"You'd know," Marge said, not unkindly, and then she squeezed my elbow, hard, and went out the back to her Pinto, which Stosh's nephew had fixed with a belt off a junked Pontiac.
I went back out. The boy had finished his long division and put it in the blue folder and was sitting with his hands flat on the counter on either side of the empty plate, and he was looking at the wall behind me. Not at me. At the photographs.
"Who's that?" he said, pointing.
I turned around. I knew which one before I looked. You do. The photographs on the wall behind the counter at Helen's had been up so long most of them had gone orange, and they hung on little nails at slight angles because nobody ever straightened them, and there was one Polaroid among them, in its white square frame, taped up with Scotch tape gone yellow and brittle, that I passed four hundred times a day and had trained myself, the way you train a dog, not to look at.
Christmas 1975. The staff of Helen's Grill in front of the pie case, which had tinsel taped around it. Helen in the middle with a Santa hat on her beehive, holding up a cigarette like a sparkler. Stosh, thinner, with all his hair, in a white paper cook's cap. Two girls who had moved away. And me, twenty-nine years old, in my uniform with my hair teased up to God, holding a baby. The baby was about nine months old and wearing a tiny red stocking cap with a white ball on it that Helen had bought at the Strouss's downtown, and he was not looking at the camera. He was looking up at me, with his hand in my mouth, and I was laughing around it.
"That's me," I said. "A long time ago."
"Who's the baby?"