He didn't finish. He didn't have to.
"You wanted it to be me," Hollis said.
Toby nodded, and now the tears came, just two of them, sliding down without any sound, and he wiped them on his sleeve furiously like they were somebody else's fault.
"That's all right," Hollis said. "That's all right, son. I'd have wanted that too."
* * *
He sat there for a while after that, longer than he should have, with his food going cold and the boy across from him trying not to cry, and he thought about what he was going to do.
The easy thing, the thing the old Hollis would have done, the thing even the newer Hollis was tempted to do, was nothing. Pay his check. Leave a good tip. Get on the bike and ride west to Kane, where he had a single-wide on two acres and a job at a sawmill that would hold for him until the surgery and maybe after. It was not his business. He did not know these people. He was a sick old man with a record that would make any state trooper in Pennsylvania put a hand on his holster, and if he stuck his nose into this and it went bad, it would go bad for him first. That was the math. He had always been good at that kind of math.
He looked at the boy, at the smear of green pencil on his finger, and he thought about a window in Erie.
He did not let himself think about it long. He had gotten good at not thinking about it long. But it was there, it was always there, the way the ghost of the patches was always there on the back of the vest: a house on West Twenty-Sixth Street, in the winter of 1994, sleet coming down orange under the streetlights, and Hollis behind the wheel of a stolen Buick with the engine running and the heater on high, waiting. Two of his brothers inside. And in the upstairs window, a boy. Nine or ten. Pajamas with something on them, rocket ships maybe. Looking down at the car. Looking at Hollis.
Hollis had looked back. And then he had looked away. And then the front door had opened.
He put that away. He picked up his fork and put it down again.
"Toby," he said. "I need you to do some things for me. Can you do that?"
Toby nodded.
"First thing. Is there a phone here? A landline?"