So I sat. I slid into the other side of booth five with the coffee pot still in my hand, and I set it on the table on a napkin so it wouldn't mark, and she watched me do it.
"You're Arlene," she said.
My name was on a tag on my uniform, so that wasn't anything. But she didn't say it like she'd read it. She said it like she'd known it a while and was checking.
"That's right."
"Arlene Hakala. You've worked here since nineteen sixty-two."
"Sixty-two," I said. "That's right. The fall. You've been in before?"
"Many times," she said. "A long time ago." She unsnapped the black handbag. She didn't take out the change purse this time. She reached in with both hands and took out a manila envelope, the big kind, nine by twelve, and laid it face down on the table between us, on the spot where her plate had been, and she smoothed it flat with her palm, slow, the way you'd smooth a tablecloth. It was soft and furred at the corners from handling. There was something written on the back in blue ballpoint, in an old-fashioned, careful hand, and I read it upside down without meaning to. It said: For the girl's mother.
She kept her hand on it. She looked at me. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was perfectly steady, the steadiest voice I'd heard all morning, steadier than mine would have been.
"You'll want to see this," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But you'll want to see it."
And she slid it across the table to me, and took her hand away.
I didn't touch it right away. I remember that. I remember looking at it the way you'd look at a dog in the road that might be dead and might not. Behind me the jukebox clicked over and somebody's quarter came up, and it was Juice Newton, "Queen of Hearts," which had been everywhere the summer before, and to this day I can't hear that song without smelling boysenberry and wet canvas.
"What is it?" I said.
"Open it," she said. "Please. Then I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you who I am. But I want you to see it first, before you know who I am, because once you know, you won't trust it. You'll think I'm a foolish old woman. Or something worse."
I undid the clasp. I tipped it up and slid what was inside out onto the Formica.
The first thing was a photo strip. One of those booths, four pictures in a column, black and white, curling a little at the edges from being kept somewhere warm. The booth at the arcade on Broadway in Seaside, by the turnaround. I knew it because I'd taken Jodie and Petey in it a dozen times, and it always made everybody look like they'd just been startled awake. The first picture was two young people with their heads together, laughing. In the second one he was kissing her cheek and she was squeezing her eyes shut. In the third they were making faces. In the fourth one the girl was looking at the camera and the young man was looking at her.