She was reaching for the patty melt, which had landed face down, when another pair of hands came into the picture. Big hands, a man's, with a small white scar across the left knuckles and a thin line of something dark, graphite or grease, under the nails. They picked up the plate, which was the heavy kind, the restaurant kind, and set it on the tray, and then they picked up the next one.
"I've got it," Cass said. "Really. I've got it, honey, you go sit."
"I know you've got it," the man said. "I'm just holding the edges."
She looked up.
He was about her age, maybe a little older, thirty-three or thirty-four, with a long patient face and brown hair that had not been cut by a professional in some time. He was wearing a corduroy jacket with the elbows gone shiny and a flannel shirt under it, and he was kneeling in gravy without seeming to care, which told her a great deal about him in a single second. Men who cared about their trousers did not kneel in the Wabash Lantern.
"Kenny," she said, turning her head so she could see the busboy, who was standing frozen with his tub, white as a dishrag. "Kenny, it's fine. Go get the mop, would you? The big one."
Kenny went.
The man held the tray steady while she stacked the plates. He did not try to take it from her. He did not try to lift it himself and carry it off to the kitchen, the way some men would have, to show the room what they could do. He held the edges, like he'd said, and he let her do the stacking, and when the last fork was on it he said, "There," quietly, as if they had finished something together that had needed both of them.
She noticed one more thing about him then. He was watching her face. Not her chest, not her legs, not the gravy. Her face. And every time she turned her head, he turned his a little too, as if he were following something.
"Thank you," she said.
"Sure."
"You're kneeling in roast beef."
"I've knelt in worse," he said. "I tune pianos. You would not believe what people keep under their pianos."
She laughed, the first real laugh she had laughed all day, and it surprised her so much that she nearly dropped the tray again.
Then she stood up, and he stood up, and she carried the wreckage through the swinging door into the kitchen, where Al Dorrance looked at her for a long moment over the grill and said nothing at all, which from Al was a whole paragraph.