Walt opened his mouth and nothing came out.
"Pancakes," Josie said quickly. "Two orders. One for me and one for Grandpa. And he'll pay for them, because we have money. Sixteen dollars."
"Josie."
"Well, we *do*."
The waitress wrote it down. Her pencil was not quite steady either. "Two stacks," she said. "Coming up."
"Wait," said Walt.
She waited. The jukebox changed records. The church families talked and laughed. Earl's spatula rang on the griddle.
Walt found that he could not do it here, in the bright noise of a Sunday morning, with Harold and his family three booths down and Alabama on the Wurlitzer. Eighteen years of silence did not end in a sentence you said over a menu. He did not even know, yet, which sentence.
"What time do you get off?" he asked.
Something flickered in the gray eyes.
"Two," she said. "We close at two on Sundays."
"Could I — could we talk? After?"
She looked at him a long moment. Then she looked at Josie, who was watching them both with her owl's eyebrows lifted all the way up.
"Tell you what," said the waitress. "Earl's going to need help with the pies for tomorrow. I make them Sunday afternoons, after close. If a certain young lady wanted to learn how to crimp a crust, I could use an extra pair of hands. And if her grandpa wanted to sit at the counter and drink coffee and be in the way, I guess he could do that too."
"Yes," said Josie, before Walt could say anything. "Yes. We want to do that."