It was nothing. It was the kind of thing people said. Waitresses had sayings the way preachers had sayings, they got them off of each other and off of the radio and off of the backs of cereal boxes. There were probably a hundred women between here and Chicago who said it.
But he had only ever heard one say it. Marian had said it. She had said it every noon of their married life, standing at the screen door of the farmhouse in her apron, calling across the yard to wherever he was — in the hog barn, under the combine, up on the windmill with a wrench in his teeth. *Walter! Eat while it's hot! The world will wait!* She had said it so many times the children said it too, mocking her and loving her at once, Jimmy in his high little-boy shout and Ellen in her mother's exact voice, so exact that when Ellen was twelve and called it across the yard one summer day Walt had come in from the field thinking it was Marian, and found his daughter standing on the porch grinning with a dish towel over her shoulder, and he had laughed until he had to sit down on the step.
Ellen.
He had not let himself think the name in a long time. He thought it now, carefully, the way you put weight on an ankle you think is broken.
"Grandpa, it's going to get cold."
"Yes," he said.
"You said grilled cheese gets cold. Gravy gets cold too."
"I know."
"You have to eat it. She said it's on the house. That means it's free. That means it's not even our money."
He picked up the fork. His hand was not quite steady and he was ashamed of it. He cut into the edge of the bread where the gravy had soaked through, and lifted it, and put it in his mouth.
It was good. It was very good — salt and fat and the deep brown taste of meat cooked slow — and his whole body seemed to fold toward it, as if he were a plant and it were a window. He had not had a hot meal since Thursday. He had not had a full meal since — he could not remember. Before the auction. Before Marian, maybe, in a way. She had been the one who made meals into meals; after she died in the spring of '83 he and Josie and Jimmy had lived on sandwiches and canned soup and Pam's casseroles, and then Pam was gone and it was only sandwiches.
He ate. He tried to eat slowly and could not. Josie watched him over her grilled cheese with an expression of profound and private satisfaction, and then, when she was sure, she picked up her own sandwich — the whole sandwich, both halves — and ate it too.
Behind the counter, the waitress named Lena wiped the same eighteen inches of Formica over and over with a gray rag, and did not look at their booth, and did not look away from it either.
* * *
Walt was halfway through the potatoes when it came back to him. Not the whole of it. Just the edge.
A diner, another one, smaller than this. Linoleum floor with a pattern of red and black diamonds. A wax-paper-wrapped sandwich on a car seat. October light, low and gold. A girl in a blue wool coat that was buttoned all the way up though it was not cold, because buttoned all the way up the coat hid what it was meant to hide.