Now the Gallus Frame did sixty breakfasts on a weekday, and some days fewer, and a good many of those sixty were coffee only, and a good many of those coffees were men who had been on the Hill and now sat at the counter from seven until ten with the Montana Standard folded to the want ads, reading the same six jobs over and over, and Stevo let them, and Lauren kept their cups full, because what else were you going to do.
So a dime was not nothing. But it was not much, either.
The old woman came back the next morning, and the next. She came every morning that week, at twenty past seven, in the gray cardigan and the scarf and the work gloves, and sat on the bad stool by the kitchen door, and drank two cups of black coffee and put thirty cents on the counter, and Lauren put in the dime. On Thursday, when it was twenty-two below at the airport the old woman's hands shook so badly around the cup that coffee slopped over the rim and onto the counter, and she looked at the spill with an expression of such private humiliation that Lauren had to turn around and pretend to be busy at the pie case.
When she turned back, she had a plate in her hand. Two eggs over easy, hash browns, a slice of ham, rye toast. She set it down in front of the old woman.
"Cook made a mistake," Lauren said. "Fella at the end wanted it scrambled. It's just going to go in the garbage."
The old woman looked at the plate. Then she looked up at Lauren, and Lauren saw that she knew perfectly well that nobody at the end of the counter had ordered anything, and that the eggs had been cracked onto the grill not ninety seconds before by Stevo Radovich, who was standing at the grill right now with his back very deliberately turned.
"That's a terrible waste," the old woman said.
"Isn't it, though," said Lauren.
There was a long moment. Then the old woman unrolled the paper napkin from around the fork and knife, and laid it in her lap, and smoothed it, and picked up the fork.
She ate everything. She ate slowly and neatly, but she ate the way people eat who have learned not to count on the next time, steadily, without looking up, and when she was finished there was nothing on the plate but the parsley. Then she did a thing Lauren would think about later. She folded the parsley into her paper napkin, and folded the napkin twice, and put it in the pocket of her cardigan.