"Because if it was me," Toivo said, "and I had what he's got riding on Friday, and my gramma went missing on Tuesday with a milk truck, I'd be looking." And he went back into the kitchen.
We worked it out between us that afternoon, in pieces, in between customers. Irja got involved, because Irja was going to get involved whether anybody asked her or not; she came and sat down with Edna during the slow part around two and held her hand and talked to her in Finnish, it turned out their mothers had sung in the same church choir in Svensen in the twenties. Edna couldn't go back to Brownsmead. That much was plain. Darrell would know by now that she'd gone, and he'd find the envelope gone, too, because Edna had taken it out of the sewing basket that very morning, and nothing else in that house was hidden from him. Edna's sister Signe was in Ilwaco, across the river, in a little house by the boat basin. She had a telephone. I called her from the pay phone at two-thirty and shouted for three minutes, and Signe Nygaard shouted back that of course Edna could come, Edna could always come, what was the matter, was it her hip, and I said yes, it's her hip, because it was easier.
My shift ended at three. Toivo told me to stay until seven, he'd pay me the hours, which he'd never done before or since, and he said I wasn't to drive her across the bridge in the daylight where anybody on Marine Drive could see her get in my car, and I didn't argue, though I thought he was being dramatic. I thought that right up until twenty minutes to six, when the purple Chevelle pulled in to the curb outside the front window and sat there in the rain with its wipers going, and a young man got out of it, and put up the collar of his jean jacket, and came in.
Edna wasn't in the dining room by then. Around four, when the light started going, Toivo had walked her back through the kitchen to the little office behind the walk-in, where he did the books on a steel desk under a calendar from a marine supply in Warrenton with a picture of a gillnetter on it, and he'd set her up in his own chair with a cup of tea and the space heater going and an afghan Irja kept back there for when her circulation was bad. He'd shut the door. From the counter you'd never have known there was anybody back there at all.
So when the bell jangled and Darrell Tolan came in shaking the rain off his shoulders, the only people in the Sandbar were Eino, who'd come back from pinochle to eat his supper, a family from out of town in booth two with a little girl doing the paper placemat maze with a crayon, Irja at the register, Toivo at the grill, and me.
He saw me right away and smiled. He had a nice smile. I want to be fair to him in this, because it would be easy not to be, and because being unfair to him is one of the ways people let men like him off the hook: they make them into monsters with horns, and then when the real one walks in with a nice smile and a wet jean jacket nobody recognizes him. He was a nice-looking young man. Medium height, slim, brown hair that he wore a little long over his collar, a mustache he was still growing into. He had very clear gray eyes and the easy look of a man with all the time in the world. His cowboy boots were dry, because he'd parked right at the curb. He smelled like Brut, like half the boys in Astoria in 1982.
"Mrs. Hakala," he said. "Hey. I didn't know you worked nights."
"I don't usually," I said. "We're short." My voice sounded ordinary. I was amazed by that. I'd been afraid it wouldn't.
"Well, hey," he said, and slid onto the stool right in front of me, and folded his hands on the counter. "That's lucky for me, then." He looked up at the menu board, and then down the room, the booths, the window, and I watched his eyes go along the row and stop, for just a second, at booth five, and come back. "Boy, I haven't been in here in years," he said. "Since I was a kid. You know that? My gramma used to bring me."