The rain started at four and by eleven it had stopped being weather and become a fact about the building.
Nobody had come in for two hours. I counted the drawer twice, then wiped down the pie case, which was already clean, because a clean pie case is a thing you can finish and I wanted to finish something before midnight.
The bell over the door rang at twenty past. A man in a wet canvas jacket, no umbrella, hair flattened to his skull. Most people shake off in the doorway. He didn't. He stood dripping on the mat and looked around the room like he was checking it against a picture he kept somewhere.
"Closed in ten," I said.
"I know." He crossed to the counter anyway. "I'll be quick."
He didn't order. He read the menu board all the way down, front to back, the way you read a letter you already know. Then he said, "Is the pie good?"
"It's fine."
"Fine." He smiled at that. "I'll take it, then. And coffee. And can I ask you something."
I poured the coffee. "You can ask."
"Does anybody ever come in here and just tell you their whole life?"
I set the cup down. "Once a week."
"What do you do with it?"
"Nothing," I said. "That's the deal."
He nodded like I had handed him something. Then he told me his.
I won't set it all down. He was a man who had moved a lot and left a lot, and in every town he'd been the one who remembered everyone. He could tell you the name of the kid who bagged groceries in a place he left nine years ago. What he couldn't do, he said, was name a single person who remembered him. Fifteen towns and there wasn't one house where his name still came up.
"I'm not sad about it," he said. "I just wanted to say it where it would stay."
"Stay where."
"Anywhere." He looked at the window, the rain going sideways under the lot light. "Out loud is the only place I've got."
I cut him the last of the pie. It was the last slice and I gave it to him without charging, because the drawer had balanced twice and because he was going to leave and I was going to keep the sentence.
A truck went by and threw water at the glass. He watched it like it was the last one he would ever see. Then he asked my name and I told him, Marisol, and he said it back once, carefully, like he was putting it somewhere.
At a quarter to twelve he stood, left a five on the counter, and went out into it. No umbrella. The bell rang. The door closed. I watched him cross the lot, and then he was gray on gray and gone.
Here is the thing I have never told anyone, because it sounds like nothing.
I can't remember his face.
I remember the five. The exact tilt of the cup. The whole of what he said, word for word. If you woke me at three and asked what a stranger told me at a quarter past eleven, I could say it back like a prayer. But when I reach for the man there is only the jacket and the rain and the shape of him standing there, checking the room against something.
Fine. That's what I said about the pie.
I still say his sentence some nights, to the empty diner, when the rain gets steady. Out loud, to nobody.
Out loud is the only place I've got, too.