"That was you," Edna said. "You called him Captain. You were very young. You had a ponytail."
"I don't remember," I said.
"No," she said. "Why would you."
Up at the pass-through Toivo had stopped scraping. I could feel him not scraping. Boysenberry, he'd said. She'll want the boysenberry. He'd known her the second she came in the door. He'd known her and he hadn't said anything, because that was Toivo, who believed that what people came in carrying was their own business until they set it down.
"Why now?" I said. "If you lied for him in seventy-nine. Why are you sitting here now?"
Edna Tolan picked up her empty coffee cup and looked into it and set it down again. I didn't fill it. I'm ashamed of that too, a little. It was the only time in twenty years at the Sandbar I let a customer's cup sit empty on purpose.
"Because I told myself a story," she said. "After Longview. I told myself that girl had been fast, and that she'd provoked him, and that boys his age have tempers and grow out of them, and that he was all I had and I was all he had and if he went to prison in Walla Walla at nineteen he'd come out something worse. I told myself that every night for a year. And then Marva Shaw's letter came, and I put it in the bottom of my sewing basket under the felt, and I told myself the story again every night for another year." She turned the cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "He came back to Brownsmead to live with me in the spring of eighty, after the mill in Longview let him go. He was sweet to me. He fixed the porch steps. He took me to the doctor in Astoria when my hip was bad. He brought me a box of Russell Stover candy on Mother's Day. So I kept telling the story. And then in February of this year he got hold of my passbook out of my dresser drawer, and he started going into the bank in Astoria with a withdrawal slip with my name on it in his handwriting, and Mrs. Ekstrom at the window knew him since he was a little boy and never thought twice. And when I asked him about it, he told me I'd given him permission. He told me I'd forgotten. He sat me down at my own kitchen table and held my hand and said, Gramma, we talked about this, don't you remember, you said I could, you're getting so forgetful lately, it scares me. And for a little while I believed him." She looked at me. "Do you understand? For about a week, I believed I was losing my mind."
"Did you tell anybody?"
"Who? My sister Signe in Ilwaco. She's eighty and deaf as a post and she thinks Darrell hung the moon. Pastor at Knappa, who also thinks Darrell hung the moon, because Darrell put a new roof on the parsonage last year for nothing." She almost smiled. "He's very good with people, my grandson. He always was. Even when he was little. He could make a grown-up do anything just by looking at them. He made you bring him whipped cream."