The next day he came back at ten past two. And the day after that.
By the end of the first week Duncan understood the arithmetic. The old man had thirty-five cents a day for coffee, and he had calculated it out to the penny, and somewhere in his calculations there was no room for food. He looked at the plates going by the way a man on a ship looks at a coast, a thing other people lived on, that had nothing to do with him.
On the second Monday, Ilda burned a hamburger patty. It was a real accident. She had been arguing with the bread man about the bill for the sesame rolls and she left it on the flat-top too long, so that it came up black on one side, and she swore at it in Portuguese and threw it on a plate and shoved the plate at Duncan through the pass-through.
"Eat it or throw it out," she said. "I'm not serving that."
Duncan looked at the plate. He looked down the counter at the old man, who was watching the channel. He went into the kitchen and put the burned patty on a toasted bun and added the pickles and the onion and a heap of fries out of the basket that were still hot from the fryer, and he carried it out and set it in front of the old man.
"Cook's mistake," he said. "It's overdone. Nobody wants it. If you don't eat it it goes in the can."
The old man looked at the plate for a long time. Then he looked up at Duncan, and Duncan saw that he knew perfectly well, and that he had decided to let Duncan think he didn't.
"That would be a waste," the old man said.
"It would."
"Well." He picked up the burger in both hands. "We can't have that."
After that, Ilda burned something nearly every day at about two-fifteen, and when she didn't, Duncan burned it for her. He put it on his own ticket and paid for it out of his tips at the end of the week, because the Anchor Light was not a charity and Ilda Amaral was a widow who had kept it open alone for eleven years, ever since her husband, Joaquim, who had cooked on Beacon Street until the redevelopment people bulldozed it, went back to fishing and his boat went down off Cedros Island in a February blow. A dollar sixty-five for a burger and fries. Eighty-five cents for the chowder. A dollar ninety for the Wednesday meatloaf. He told himself he would have done it for anybody. That was mostly true.
Ilda knew, of course. She was sixty-one, five feet tall in her work shoes, with hair dyed a hard shiny black under a net and forearms like a longshoreman's from forty years of stockpots. On the second Friday she came out of the kitchen and stood at the end of the counter with her arms folded and watched the old man eat a plate of fish and chips Duncan had told him somebody sent back, and then she looked at Duncan.