The driver's license was on the kitchen table when Arvel Johnson came down at six-fifteen, propped against the sugar bowl like a place card at a wedding.
Imogene had put it there the night before. He knew that because she had put it there every night since Thursday, and every morning she pretended she had not, and every morning he pretended not to see it until he had poured his coffee and sat down across from it and leaned in close, the way he had to lean in close to everything now, and said, "Well, look at that. Some woman left her license on my table."
"Hush," Imogene said from the stove.
He picked it up. It was still warm from the room, the way plastic gets, and it was so new the edges were sharp. Commonwealth of Kentucky. Johnson, Imogene Ruth. Her photograph was a dark smudge to him at that distance, a shape with a brighter shape where the face was, but he did not need to see it. He had been there at the counter in the driver licensing office on Frederica Street when the young woman with the eyebrow ring told Imogene to look at the dot, and Imogene had looked at the dot with the expression of a person staring down a rattlesnake, and then, at the last second, without meaning to, she had smiled. He had seen that smile at a distance of four feet, which was still close enough, and he had decided he would carry it around in his head for whatever time he had left.
"Seventy-one years old," he said. "First time in her life."
"You said that already."
"I'll say it again tomorrow."
"I expect you will." She brought the skillet over and slid two eggs onto his plate, and then stood with the spatula in her hand and looked at him, and he knew she was looking at the jacket.
He had worn it down on purpose. He had known she would say something, and he had wanted to get the saying over with before it was time to leave.
It was a brown corduroy jacket, or it had been brown once, the color of a wet paper bag. Now it was the color of a dry one. The wale had worn flat down the front where his forearms rested on tables, and at the cuffs the cord had rubbed away entirely, so that the fabric there had the bald sheen of an old dog's ear. There were suede patches on both elbows. They were not the original patches. The original patches had gone through in 1995, and Imogene had