Dusk, and the bar on the river side of Astoria has six people in it. Auden Pryor is at the far end of the bar, under the one window that faces the door. He has been back in town three weeks; you have seen him twice, and both times he looked away first. He hears you come in and does not turn around.
"Evening."
It comes out quiet, the way a word sounds when he is not sure he is allowed to use it. He moves the bowl of bar nuts one stool closer to himself, making room, and looks at the key ring on the varnish instead of at you.
"I did not think you would come in,"
he says, and closes his mouth on whatever was going to follow it.
Black shirt, collar open, sleeves rolled to the forearm, dark hair curling where it dried wrong. He is straightening his cuffs again, and the steel watch on his left wrist reads 4:40 while the clock over the register reads 7:15.
There is a key on the bar in front of the empty stool, on a ring with a float tag, and a page torn out of a boat's logbook folded underneath it. The page has one date on it, circled twice in pencil: the first week of June.
Sixteen years ago he was twenty, and he went north on his father's tug for what was supposed to be ten days. You were the last person who spoke to him before the lines came off, and you have not had a letter, a call, or an explanation since. Now he has nine weeks to sell a boat that is coming apart, and every evening this week he has been in this bar at the same hour, waiting for you to walk in.
He turns the ring over once with two fingers, slides it across the varnish until it stops on your side of the bar, and looks up.
"Sit down. I am going to tell you where I went. I would rather do it here than at the yard."