"How did you get here?"
"The milk truck," she said. "I rode in with the Darigold driver this morning at five. He's a nice young man. He let me off at the Safeway on Commercial. I've been walking up and down in the rain since six, trying to make my feet come in this door." She looked at the window. "And then when I came in, I saw it was still the same. The tape on the seat. The hooks in the ceiling. The bridge. And I thought, I can't do it on an empty stomach. I can't. I haven't been able to eat in four days. And I thought, if I could just sit here one more time and have what he used to have, I'd remember him how he was when he was six. Kneeling right there with his nose on the glass. Before I had to give him up. And then you brought them without my asking. With the boysenberry. As if you'd known." She pressed her lips together hard. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for that to be part of it. I had thirty-five cents for a coffee and I was going to drink it and give you the envelope and go. I didn't come here for charity."
"I know," I said. And I did, by then. That was the strange thing. I didn't trust her and I didn't like her and I wanted to slap her for 1979 and for Lori Shaw's jaw and for Marva Shaw's letter in the bottom of a sewing basket for two years, and I knew, all at the same time, that she hadn't come in for pancakes. The pancakes had been a kind of goodbye. She'd been sitting across from a six-year-old in a striped T-shirt who wasn't there anymore, and I had brought the plate. Whatever else she'd lied about in her life, she wasn't lying about that.
"What do you want me to do?" I said.
"Whatever you would have done if you'd known three months ago," she said. "Whatever I should have done three years ago."
"Will you go to the sheriff? With me?"
She was quiet a long time. Then she said, "If it comes to that, yes." And then, so quietly I almost didn't hear it, "He's my boy, Arlene. He's still my boy. You'll understand that better than anybody. Don't ask me to like it."
That was a little after noon. The lunch trade started coming in, what there was of it, longshoremen from the port and a couple of ladies from the county courthouse who always split a chef's salad, and I had to get up. I left her in booth five with the envelope and a fresh cup of coffee that I poured without asking and without charging, and I went and worked. I don't remember any of that lunch. Irja said afterward I gave a longshoreman banana cream pie instead of clam chowder and he ate it without a word.
At one o'clock I went to the pay phone. It was on the wall by the restrooms, a black Pacific Northwest Bell phone with a steel cord and a little shelf under it where people had written numbers and other things in ballpoint for twenty years. I put in a dime and a dime and called home. It rang eleven times. I knew perfectly well Jodie was at school. I let it ring anyway, standing there with my forehead against the wall, because I needed to hear it ring in our kitchen. Then I hung up and the dimes came back down into the cup and I stood looking at them.