The memory of this diner didn’t belong to Cole, and it sat wrong in his head anyway Maddie used to bring Charlie here after their mother’s chemo appointments, and some part of the body he was wearing knew the smell of burned bacon grease and old syrup before Cole did.
Maddie sat across from him with her hands around a coffee cup she wasn’t drinking.
Her husband Mike Joliet cop, name scraped from the drifter’s thin memory sat in the booth behind them, close enough to hear if Cole raised his voice.
“You look different,” Maddie said.
Cole nodded.
“Yeah.”
“You sound different.”
“I know.”
She held his gaze until Cole had to look away.
The waitress came by and he ordered coffee he didn’t want.
Maddie waited until the woman was gone.
“What was the dog’s name.”
Cole blinked.
“What.”
“The dog.
The one we had when I was twelve.
You threw a fit when Dad wanted to give it away.” Maddie’s hands tightened on the cup.
“What was its name.”
Cole did not know.
Charlie had known.
Charlie was gone.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
Maddie’s face went flat.
“Bingo.
The dog’s name was Bingo and you cried for a week.” She set the cup down.
“Who are you.”
“I’m in trouble, Maddie.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Mike shifted in the booth behind them.
Cole could feel the man’s attention like a hand on the back of his neck.
She leaned forward.
Her voice dropped.
“Mom’s not gonna make it past spring.
You gonna be a person about it, or not.”
Cole’s chest went tight.
The drifter’s mother.
Dying.
A hospice in Joliet he had never visited and a face he couldn’t place blurred behind someone else’s grief.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Both.”
She sat back, stared into her coffee, then at him, then past him toward the window and the parking lot under a gray April sky.
“You owe somebody money.”
“No.”
“You kill somebody.”
“No.”
“Then what.”
Cole counted the booths between theirs and the door.
Four.
He studied her hands and they were his sister’s hands except they weren’t, they were a stranger’s, and the whole wrong shape of it pressed down on him like a thumb.
“I can’t tell you,” he said.
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Don’t.” She picked up the cup, drank, set it down hard enough the saucer rattled.
“You show up looking like you, sounding like somebody else, and you can’t remember Bingo.
You think I’m stupid.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
Cole turned his palms over.
No scars Charlie would have had.
No calluses in the right places.
A body he had woken into and a name he had no right to and a woman across the booth who wanted her brother back and was never going to get him.
“I got into something I can’t get out of,” he said.
“And I need to disappear for a while.”
“How long’s a while.”
“I don’t know.”
Mike stood up.
He came around the booth and slid in next to Maddie, not touching her but close, and he looked at Cole the way cops look at men they are deciding whether to run.
“Where you been the last two weeks,” Mike said.
“Missouri.
Kansas.”
“Doing what.”
“Driving.”
“You got a job.”
“No.”
“You got money.”
Cole thought of the two hundred dollars in his jacket from the groundskeeper and the Zippo tin he’d buried at a crossroads four nights ago.
“Some.”
Mike’s jaw worked.
“Maddie says you don’t sound right.
You on something.”
“No.”
“You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
“I haven’t.”
“That’s not an answer that makes me feel better about you sitting across from my wife.”
Cole met his eyes.
Held them.
“I’m not gonna hurt her.”
“You already are.”
She put a hand on Mike’s wrist.
He stopped talking.
Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying she’d already decided he wasn’t her brother, Cole could see it plain on her, and she was working out what to do about it, calm as a woman doing math.
“You in trouble with the law,” she said.
“No.”
“You sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m gonna do you a favor exactly once.” Her voice was steady.
“You’re gonna get up and walk out of here and I’m not gonna tell Mike to follow you.
And you’re not gonna come back.”
“Maddie”
“I’m not done.” She leaned forward.
“I don’t know what happened to Charlie.
Maybe you did something to him, maybe he did something to himself, maybe he ran and you’re the poor bastard wearing his face.
Doesn’t matter.
Mom’s dying and I can’t I can’t do this with you too.”
Cole’s throat closed.
“So you go,” Maddie said.
“And I’ll tell her you came by and you looked good and you said you were sorry.
And that’s the last time I lie for you.”
“Maddie”
“It’s fine.” She didn’t look at him.
“He’s leaving.”
Cole stood up.
His legs felt like they were made of something that wasn’t bone.
He put two twenties on the table for a coffee he hadn’t touched and turned toward the door.
“Charlie.”
He stopped.
Looked back.
Maddie’s face was stone.
“Sort out whatever you’re running from, Charlie.
For real.”
Cole nodded.
He walked out.
He sat in the truck in the parking lot with his hands on the wheel and did not start the engine.
The diner’s window showed Maddie and Mike still in the booth, talking, Mike’s hands moving fast and Maddie shaking her head.
Cole opened the glove box.
The drifter’s wallet was in there with a driver’s license that said Charles Brenner and an address in Joliet and a photo of a man who looked like Cole but wasn’t.
The license came out easy.
He stared at the photo, put it in his jacket pocket.
The truck coughed to life and he drove north.
The rest stop was an hour past Joliet, a low brick building with vending machines and a burnt-out light over the men’s room.
Cole parked in the back corner where the security camera couldn’t see and got out with the license in his hand.
He read it one last time.
Charles Anthony Brenner.
Twenty-five.
Organ donor.
A gas station Bic from Joplin sat in the cupholder.
He picked it up, held the license by one corner.
Flicked.
The flame bent sideways in the wind.
The license caught slow.
Plastic curled and blackened, dripping onto the asphalt with a chemical stink that coated the back of his tongue.
The photo went first the drifter’s face bubbling into nothing then the name, then the address.
Cole held the burning corner until heat bit his fingers and dropped it and ground it under his boot.
Back in the truck.
A notebook on the passenger seat he opened it to a blank page and wrote in handwriting that wasn’t Charlie’s:
Maddie I’m sorry I wasn’t him.
Tell your mom I’m sorry too.
You don’t owe me the lie but thank you for it.
I won’t come back.
He tore the page out, folded it, wrote Maddie Brenner on the outside and her address under it.
No stamp for the envelope.
He drove until he found a post office drop box and stood in the blue pre-dawn light with the envelope in his hand.
The note did not lie.
It was the one clean thing he could leave behind, and he dropped it in the slot and heard it hit the bottom and walked back to the truck.
The pulled-tooth ache in his chest was still there.
The sliver was gone and the four years were gone and now the name was gone too and all he had left was the kit and the road and the cases no one else would work.
The engine turned over on the second try.
West, toward the next town on the list a man who’d called about his daughter and a thing in the woods and Cole didn’t look back at Joliet.
Not in the mirror.
Not once.