"Remake on table nine," she said. "Two roast, patty melt, chef. I'll eat the cost."
"You won't," Al said.
"I will, Al."
"Kid said behind you."
"I know he did."
Al looked at her a little longer. He was the only person at the Lantern who knew, and he knew because he had caught her once, two winters ago, standing by the walk-in cooler with her finger in her left ear, pressing and pressing as if she could push something back into place. He had not asked. He had just started saying her orders twice when she was standing on his right, and turning the kitchen radio down, and taking the bell off the pass-through and replacing it with a little red flag on a spring that he flicked up when an order was ready, so she could see it from across the room. He told everyone else it was because the bell gave him a headache.
"I'll eat the cost," Cass said again, and went back out.
The man in the corduroy jacket had gone back to his booth. It was number four, against the window, the one with the tear in the red vinyl that had been patched with electrical tape. Across from him sat a little girl.
Cass had noticed the girl before, when they came in. You noticed children at the Lantern because you had to know where they were at all times, the way you know where the stove is. This one was seven or eight, small for it, with a dark bowl haircut that someone had clearly done at home with a pair of kitchen scissors and a great deal of love and not much skill. She wore a yellow raincoat even though it was not raining and she had a stack of paper napkins in front of her that she was folding into something, triangles on triangles, very seriously, with her tongue between her teeth.
She was not folding now. She was staring at Cass.
Not the way children usually stared after something crashed, with that bright, guilty delight. She was staring the way you stare at someone you think you know from somewhere and cannot place. Her mouth was a little open.
Cass went to bring them their check, because they had finished their supper before the accident, grilled cheese for the girl and the meatloaf for him. She stood on the right side of the booth, the side she always stood on, and she put down the check and two peppermints from her apron pocket, and she said, "On the house for the cleanup crew. I mean the mints, not the meatloaf. The meatloaf's on you."
"Fair," the man said.
The girl said, "Say it again."
Cass looked at her. "Say what again, sweetheart?"