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.
"I told him to pick me up here," she said, not looking at me. "Instead of the house. At seven." She looked out at the street. "I wanted it to be somewhere with people. Lori said that. Somewhere with people."
"Okay," I said.
"I haven't decided anything," she said. "I want you to know that. I don't know what I'm going to say to him. I don't know what I'm going to do. I packed the bag last night because I didn't know, and I couldn't sleep, and packing it was something to do with my hands." She looked up at me then. Her eyes were red. "Can I have pancakes? The way she had them?"
I went to the pass-through. Toivo was already ladling batter. He'd been watching through the window the whole time, the way he watched everything. He didn't say anything. He made three, the size of saucers, golden, the edges just barely lacy, and set the plate in the window, and then he reached under the counter and set something beside it. It was the can of Reddi-wip.
I looked at him.
"It's hers," he said. "Not his. It was never his. You were giving it to a kid who was scared. Give it to this one."
So I took the plate down to booth five, with the boysenberry in the little steel pitcher, and a swirl of whipped cream on top, big, the way I must have done it once for a little boy in a striped shirt who wanted to be a ship's captain, and I set it in front of my daughter. She looked at it, and for one second her nose wrinkled up the way it had since she was a baby, and then it didn't.
At two minutes past seven the purple Chevelle pulled up to the curb in the soft rain and sat there with its wipers going. Darrell didn't get out. He honked once, a short, light tap, friendly. Through the windshield I could see him lean over and look in at the window of the Sandbar, at booth five, at her, and smile, and lift two fingers off the steering wheel.