It was the last thing I'd expected him to say. He didn't wait for me to answer. He just lay down on the booth bench, sideways, in my cardigan, with his wrapped feet tucked up and his head on the red bookbag, and he was asleep almost before I'd got up. Out like a light, the way kids go, all at once, as though somebody had pulled a cord.
I stood there. I should have woken him. I should have gotten his address out of him and called someone, the way Marge said, the way Helen said, the way any sensible woman would have. But he was nine years old and soaking wet and he had walked a mile and a half uphill in sleet to sit in a booth at a closed diner, and I could not make myself put my hand on his shoulder. I went and finished counting the drawer instead. Fifty-one dollars and forty cents for the whole day. I wrote it on the slip. I wiped down the counter. I married the ketchups. I came back and he hadn't moved, except that in his sleep he'd worked his right hand into the front pocket of the bookbag under his head, the zipper pocket, and pulled something partway out, and was holding it against his cheek.
It was yellow.
I want to tell this part right. I want to tell it slowly, because it happened slowly, though I suppose it was only a few seconds.
First I saw that it was yellow, and wool, and old, the yellow gone soft and grayish the way wool goes after too many washes. I thought: a mitten. Then I saw that it was flat and squarish, about the size of a dinner napkin, and that its edges had been hemmed by hand with a running stitch in brown thread, not very well, as if somebody had cut it down from something bigger and done their best to keep it from unraveling. I thought: a piece of a sweater. Somebody cut up an old sweater for him. Then I saw the basketweave stitch, the little squares going over and under, over and under. I thought: that's a basketweave. My mother taught me that. And then I saw that along one side of the square there was a band of green, faded almost to gray, but green, the green of new leaves, and in the very corner of the green there was a shape stitched in, lopsided, a straight line with two lines coming off it at angles.
And I saw, running all the way across the green band just above the boy's thumb, a crooked row. A lumpy, puckered line where the stitches had been dropped and picked up wrong by somebody whose hands were shaking, so that the knitting rode up and bunched like a badly sewn seam.
His thumb was on it. While I watched, still asleep, he rubbed it. Back and forth, across the bumps, the way you'd rub a worry stone.
I sat down on the bench across from him. I didn't decide to; my knees did it. I sat there in the empty grill with the lights off over the booths and the sleet going and the radiator ticking, and I looked at the boy's sleeping face, and I looked, I mean really looked, for the first time, and of course, of course. It was all there. It had been there since Tuesday. The brown hair falling in his eyes. The eyes that went gray or green. The way he received people, sitting up on his stool at the end of the counter with his hands flat on either side of his plate, like a little mayor in a basket. I had been looking at him for four days, at the face of a nine-year-old, and searching it, without knowing that I was searching it, for the face of a fourteen-month-old I'd handed across a table, and the two had not lined up because I had not let them, because I had told myself so many times that I would never see that baby again that I had made it true by not seeing him.
The K was for Katie. He was holding the K for Katie against his cheek.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for his socks to start to steam. At some point I got up and went into the walk-in and shut the door and stood among the eggs again, and this time I did not cross my arms and wait to breathe. This time I put both hands over my face and cried, in the cold, with the compressor humming, harder than I had cried since the floor of that little room on Poland Avenue in 1976. It was like something had been dammed up in me for nine years and somebody had pulled out a single board.
When I came out he was sitting up in the booth in my cardigan, his hair sticking up on one side, holding the yellow square in both hands in his lap. He'd seen me go in, I think. He'd heard me through the door. He looked at me with a face that wasn't a pond anymore. It was a nine-year-old's face, and it was terrified.