Toby was sitting on the curb behind the diner, holding a dish towel against a bleeding lip. His apron was ripped. A few feet away, his boss, a big man named Sal, had a lanky teenager pinned against the dumpster by the collar while another boy sprinted down the alley. Sal looked at me, then held up something that glinted under the security light.

It was a set of military dog tags on a beaded chain. I knew them before I saw the name. They had hung on my husband’s neck for twelve years and in Toby’s room since the funeral. “Your son has been paying these punks forty dollars every Saturday for five months,” Sal said. “They told him it was the only way he’d ever get his father’s tags back.”