"Just the coffee," the old woman said. "Thank you."
She drank it slowly, holding the cup in both hands under her chin so that the steam came up into her face. She had a second cup. Lauren poured it without asking. On the shelf by the register the radio was tuned to KBOW, as it always was, and the man was reading the temperature at the airport, fourteen below, and then a short piece of news about the Berkeley Pit, where the water had now risen another eleven feet since the pumps shut off in April of last year, and a man from the Montana Bureau of Mines was saying that nobody really knew how high it would go. Somebody at the counter said, "To the top, is how high," and somebody else laughed, and the old woman did not laugh. She sat with her cup and looked at the wall above the grill, where Stevo Radovich had hung the photograph of the Steward mine headframe with the shift coming off in 1948, three hundred men with their lunch buckets, black to the eyes with rock dust, grinning like they'd been let out of school.
When she got up to go, she put thirty cents on the counter. Coffee had been forty cents at the Gallus Frame since August.
Lauren looked at the three dimes. She looked at the old woman pulling on the work gloves at the door, one finger at a time, and she looked at the cardigan, and she did the arithmetic every waitress in that town was doing every hour of every day in the winter of 1983, which was not how much a person owed but how much a person had.
"You have a good one," Lauren said. "Stay warm."
The old woman paused with her hand on the push bar. She turned her head a little, and for a second Lauren thought she was going to say something. Then she just nodded and went out into the white, and the door hissed shut on its pneumatic arm behind her, and Lauren put a dime of her own in the register and the three dimes in after it.
That was how it started. That was all it was, at first. A dime.
The Gallus Frame sat on the north side of East Park Street, uptown, in the bottom of a three-story brick building that had been a saloon and then a Chinese laundry and then, from 1946 on, a cafe. Stevo's father Milovan had opened it after the war and painted GALLUS FRAME on the window in red and gold, the way Butte people said it, and every few years a sign man asked Stevo if he was sure about the spelling, and Stevo said he was sure. There were sixteen stools and six booths and a grill you could see from every seat. Stevo did the grill. Shirl Duffy did mornings with Lauren and went home at one to her husband, who had the miner's con and could not be left alone in the afternoons anymore.
Before the summer, the Gallus Frame had done a hundred and forty breakfasts on a weekday. There had been fat years and thin years in Butte for as long as there had been a Butte, strikes and shutdowns and the long slide since the fifties, the underground going quiet one mine at a time and the Berkeley Pit eating the old neighborhoods of Meaderville and McQueen and East Butte, the Columbia Gardens closed and then burned. But there had always been the Company. First Anaconda, and then, since 1977, the Atlantic Richfield Company, which had bought Anaconda and which everybody called ARCO and nobody liked. You could hate the Company. Most people did. But the Company was there in the morning.
ARCO had shut off the pumps in the underground in April of 1982, and the water had started to come up in the old workings and into the Pit. And then in June of 1983 the Company had announced that it was suspending mining operations in Butte at the end of the month, all of them, the East Pit and the concentrator and everything, and on the thirtieth of June the last shift came down off the Hill, and that was the end of a hundred years. Lauren's husband Gordie had been a shovel operator in the East Pit. He had run a P&H 2800 with a bucket on it the size of their kitchen. On the first of July he was home at nine in the morning, sitting at their kitchen table on Caledonia Street with his hands flat on the oilcloth, looking at them as if they belonged to somebody else.