"Not yet," I said. "I don't think. I hope. It's my daughter. She's seventeen."
She breathed. I could hear a television behind her, and a dog. "Lori's at work," she said. "She works days now at the bakery on Commerce. She doesn't work nights." Another silence. "She'd talk to your girl. If your girl wanted. I know she would. She's said so. That if it ever happened again she'd want to have been asked." And she gave me the number, and I wrote it on the back of a guest check, and that night I put it on Jodie's pillow without a word, and in the morning it was gone. I don't know if she called. I've never asked. That was hers too.
On Thursday I went to the sheriff's office on my break. Deputy Ekstrom was a heavy, kind, tired man who'd been eating chili at the Sandbar on Fridays for fifteen years. He looked at the passbook for a long time and at the list for a longer time, and he said the Longview business was Washington's and closed and three years cold, and that there wasn't much an Oregon deputy could do about it except remember it. But the withdrawal slips were another thing. Forgery was forgery. His wife had been the teller, he said, and he said it with his ears going red. If Mrs. Tolan would come in and swear to it, he'd drive out to Brownsmead. He didn't promise anything. Nobody in this story ever promised anything. He wrote it down on a yellow legal pad and said he'd call Signe Nygaard's house, and he said, "Arlene, your girl. Is she going to be all right?" and I said I didn't know.
That was the truth. Thursday night Jodie came home from the Dairy Queen on the bus, and went in her room, and I heard her on the phone in the kitchen late, the cord stretched under her door, talking very low. I didn't listen. It nearly killed me, not listening.
On Friday morning, the fifteenth of October, the rain let up a little. It didn't stop. It never stops in October at the mouth of the Columbia. But it came down straight for once instead of sideways, soft and gray, and you could see the bridge clear across to Washington for the first time all week, the long low span floating on the water like a pencil line. I was at the Sandbar at five-thirty to open, because it was my day, and because I didn't know what else to do with myself. Jodie had been asleep, or pretending to be, when I left. Her door was shut.
At ten minutes to seven, the bell jangled.
She had on the yellow windbreaker, with the hood up, and her hair pulled back in the bluebird barrette. She had her blue canvas duffel bag over her shoulder, the one she'd taken to Girl Scout camp, and it was full. I saw that it was full. I want to be honest: I saw that and my heart stopped. She came down the aisle past Eino, who looked very carefully at his newspaper, and she slid into booth five, on the side facing the window, the side where a little boy used to kneel with his nose on the glass, and she put the duffel bag on the floor under the table.
I came down with the pot. My hand was shaking so much the coffee slopped onto the saucer.