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.
"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