Chapter 2 — THE GIRL ON THE STEP

I did not say anything for a while.

Renata told me later it was about eight seconds and that she thought I was having a stroke.

What I was doing was arithmetic.

My daughter left this town in September of 2005. She was eighteen years and one month old. She took a duffel bag and my wife's car, which I had told her she could have, and she did not say goodbye to me and she has not spoken to me since.

Twenty years.

She would be thirty-eight.

The boy in front of me was about ten, which meant she had him at about twenty-eight, which meant there were eighteen years of her life between the driveway and him that I knew nothing about at all.

I said, "Where is she?"

"At the hospital."

"Which hospital?"

"St. Brendan's."

That is two miles from where I was sitting.

"How long has she been there?"

"Since Sunday." He thought about it. "The other Sunday. Not this one."

Nine days.

I said, "Who's been looking after you?"

"Me."

And then — and I did not put this together until he said it, which tells you what kind of shape my head was in — he said:

"Mabel's outside."

I turned around.

The diner doors are glass and there is a concrete step outside them, and the light from inside falls about four feet out onto that step and then stops.

There was a little girl sitting on it with her back to us.

Red coat. Too big — the sleeves were past her hands. She had a plastic grocery bag on her knees and she was holding it with both arms the way you hold something you have been told not to put down.

She had been out there in thirty-four degrees the entire time.

I said, "How long has your sister been on that step?"

"Since we got here."

"How long is that?"

He shrugged.

Renata went out and got her.

I want to say that I did, and I did not. I was still on the stool holding the edge of the counter.

Renata went out with no coat on and crouched down on that step and talked to her for a minute, and then brought her in with a hand on her back, and Mabel came in looking at the floor and sat on the stool next to her brother and did not say one word.

She was six.

In the bag was a hairbrush, a stuffed rabbit with one ear, a child's toothbrush, and a school reader with a library sticker on the spine that was four months overdue.

That was everything she had brought.

Costa fired the grill.

Dwight cooked, because Dwight is the one who can cook, and he cooked without saying anything and he did not look at me, and when he brought the plates out he had put an extra egg on the boy's without being asked.

I have thought about that egg a great deal.

People wanted Dwight fired. There was a stretch in February when four different people told me I should have fired him.

I never did.

The man said get out to a hungry child and that is a real thing and it is on the record and he will carry it. He also put an extra egg on the plate eleven minutes later, and I have decided that the second thing is not nothing, and that a person who is being paid nine dollars an hour to hit a closing time is not the villain of this story.

There is no villain in this story.

That took me about six months to work out and it made everything harder.

The children ate.

Mabel ate the way small children eat when they have been hungry for a while, which is very fast and then all at once not at all, and then she fell asleep sitting up at the counter with her head on her brother's arm.

Eli — I did not know his name yet, at that point he was still just the boy — Eli kept eating and watched me the whole time.

I said, "Where are you staying?"

"The Bluebird."

I know the Bluebird. It is a motel on the north end of Route 9 with a weekly rate.

"Who's paying for it?"

"Mom paid until Sunday."

"This Sunday coming?"

"The one that already happened."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"Son," I said. "How much money have you got?"

He put down his fork and unzipped the front pocket of his backpack and took out a folded envelope with a rubber band around it, and inside it was sixty-one dollars.