I looked at that list for a long time. J was my daughter. A was me. Friday the fifteenth was three days away.
"He leaves things in his jeans," the old woman said, very quietly. "I do the wash. I've always done his wash. He's never once in his life thought about where his clean clothes come from." She folded her hands on the table. "My name is Edna Tolan. Darrell is my grandson. I raised him from the time he was four. And I lied to the sheriff for him, three years ago, about that girl in Longview. I drove up there and sat in a room in Kelso with a deputy and I put my hand on a Bible they didn't even ask me to put my hand on and I told him Darrell was at home with me in Brownsmead that whole weekend, watching Lawrence Welk. And that girl's mother knew it and her daughter knew it and they couldn't prove it, and that was the end of it." She stopped. She took a breath. "So now you know who I am. Now you can decide whether to believe any of it."
I'd like to tell you I said something good then. I didn't. What I said was, "Get out." Not loud. I didn't want Eino to hear. But I said it, and I meant it, and I watched it hit her like a hand.
She didn't get up. She closed her eyes for a second, and nodded, as if I'd only told her something she'd expected to hear. Then she opened them again.
"I will," she said. "In a minute. I'll go wherever you want me to go. But please, Arlene. Not until you've heard all of it. You don't have to forgive me. Nobody's asking you to. You only have to hear it."
I didn't say anything. I didn't trust myself to. I was looking at the photo strip again, at the fourth picture, at my daughter laughing in her yellow windbreaker and the young man beside her doing his arithmetic.
"His mother was my daughter, Ardith," Edna Tolan said. "She had him when she was seventeen. The father was a boy from Seaside who went to Vietnam and never came back, and I don't mean he died, I mean he never came back. Ardith drank. She left Darrell with me the summer he was four and went down to California with a man who sold encyclopedias, and that was nineteen sixty-four, and I've had two postcards from her since, both from Bakersfield. My husband, Orval, had a stroke in sixty-five and was gone in a week. So it was me and the boy, out on the place in Brownsmead with twelve cows and a milk check. And every Sunday after church at Knappa, I drove him into Astoria, all the way in, twenty miles, because he loved the bridge. He loved to watch the ships. And we came here. Every single Sunday, from nineteen sixty-five until he was eleven or so and too old to want to be seen with his grandmother. And we sat right here." She laid her hand flat on the table. "This booth. Him on that side, where you are. And he had pancakes. Always pancakes. With the boysenberry. And the waitress always brought him extra whipped cream on top, even though it wasn't on the menu, in a big swirl, and she called him Captain, because he told her once he was going to be a ship's captain, and he loved her for it. He used to talk about her all week. When are we going to see the lady who calls me Captain."
She looked at me. I looked back.
I'd like to say I remembered. I didn't, not then, not in any way you could have put in words. I've served a hundred thousand children. But somewhere in the back of my head, under everything, there was a little boy with a cowlick in a striped T-shirt kneeling up on that seat with his nose on the glass, pointing at a freighter going under the bridge and saying, That's mine, that's my ship, and the feeling of a cold can of Reddi-wip in my hand. And I couldn't swear that it was him. I couldn't swear it wasn't.