The woman at the deli started crying when I ordered. I’ve been going there since it opened, always the same order: turkey on rye, twice a week, for four years. She said I ordered it exactly the way her brother did, in the exact words, and her brother has been missing since 2016. I told her I was sorry and I meant it, and I tried to make it small for her, because what else do you do. She wasn’t finished.
She asked where I grew up, and I told her. She put both hands flat on the counter and stared at me for several seconds. Then she asked whether I had ever lived in another town, and I said no. She asked if I had any brothers, and I told her I didn’t. Her face changed again, and she quietly asked me to repeat my order. When I did, she turned around and disappeared into the back room.
She came back holding an old photograph. It showed her brother sitting at the same counter, eating a turkey sandwich on rye. I recognized the jacket he was wearing because I owned one almost identical to it, but that wasn’t what bothered me. Behind him was a handwritten menu board with the name of the town where I grew up. The photograph had been taken in 2015, a year before he disappeared. I asked her where the picture came from, and she said her brother had mailed it to her two weeks before he vanished.
Then she opened a small envelope that had been tucked behind the photograph. Inside was a receipt from a deli in my hometown, dated three days before her brother disappeared. The order printed on it was exactly mine, down to the extra mustard and the way the sandwich was cut. At the bottom of the receipt was a name I didn’t recognize. She looked at me and said that name was the last person her brother had been seen with. Then she turned the receipt over, and there was a handwritten address on the back—the address of the house where I grew up.:::
