The first morning the old woman came into the Gallus Frame Cafe, the thermometer bolted outside the front window said eleven below, and she was wearing a cardigan.
Lauren Sefcik noticed the cardigan before she noticed anything else, because you could not work a counter in Butte, Montana, for nine winters without learning to read what people wore against the cold the way a nurse reads a chart.
A man in a quilted Carhartt and Sorels had a truck with a block heater and somewhere to be. A woman in a fur-collared wool coat from Hennessy's, the good kind, bought in 1961 and kept in a cedar closet, had come uptown to the bank and would order tea and leave a quarter.
And a woman of eighty, or close to it, in a gray cardigan buttoned to the throat over a housedress, with a wool scarf tied under her chin and a pair of men's leather work gloves on her hands, at seven-twenty in the morning on the fifth of December, 1983, with the air outside so cold that the snow on Park Street squeaked like Styrofoam when you stepped on it, had either lost her mind or lost her coat.
Lauren could not tell which, at first. That was what bothered her.
The old woman stood inside the door for a moment with the cold coming off her in a visible sheet, the way it came off everybody that winter, a little ghost of white that rolled across the linoleum and dissolved under the first row of stools. Then she took off the gloves, one finger at a time, and laid them together on the counter, and sat down on the stool at the far end by the pie case, which was the stool nobody wanted because it was next to the swinging door to the kitchen, and you got hit in the elbow every time Shirl Duffy came through with a tray.
"Coffee, please," she said. "Black."
She had a voice like a church organ played very softly, a little reedy at the edges, with something under the Butte flatness that Lauren couldn't place. She had white hair cut short under the scarf, and pale eyes the color of dishwater, and a face that had once been broad and was now mostly bone, with a tiny brown mole on the left cheekbone and a split in her lower lip that had cracked in the cold and bled a little and dried. Her hands, when she wrapped them around the cup, were red and swollen at the knuckles, and the skin on the backs of them was so thin that Lauren could see the blue lines of the veins running under it like the roads on a gas station map.
"You want a menu, hon?"