"It's not, really, she can't just—"
"It's all right," Cass said again, and she meant it, and she was surprised that she meant it. She looked down at the girl, who was looking back up at her with a kind of fierce, held-breath hope that Cass recognized, because she had seen it in her own mirror at that age, when she had wanted something so badly she was afraid to blink in case it went away.
"I get off at nine," Cass said. "That's past your bedtime, I bet."
"It's eight," Romy said gravely. "Eight-thirty on Fridays."
"Well, this is Thursday. So I guess that's a no for tonight." She tucked her pencil back behind her ear. Her right ear. "But you come back sometime and sit in my section, and I'll bring you a piece of the coconut cream that Al doesn't let anybody have, and I'll sit with you on my break. How's that?"
Romy considered this offer with great care, as though it were a contract.
"Okay," she said at last. "Okay. That's a yes."
The man paid the check at the register. He left a tip on the table that was too big, and when Cass ran after him with it, out onto the sidewalk under the half-dark lantern, he was already putting his daughter into the passenger seat of a brown Chevy Citation with a faded bumper sticker that said I BRAKE FOR STEINWAYS.
"You left too much," she said.
"I didn't, though."
"You did. That's a ten. That's a ten on a seven-dollar check."
"There was a lot of roast beef on that floor," he said. "I figure some of it was mine, morally."
She stood there holding the ten-dollar bill. The evening was coming down soft and blue over Market Street, and the Wabash River, two blocks south, was giving off that green spring smell it had for about one week a year, before it went back to smelling like the river.
"What's your name?" she said. "In case she comes back and I need to know who to blame."
"Hobie," he said. "Hobie Elkins. That's Romy."