"Good," said the waitress, and went to get the pancakes, and Walt saw that at the swinging door to the kitchen she stopped, and put one hand flat against the wall, and stood there a second with her head down, and then pushed through.
* * *
At two o'clock Earl flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED and pulled the shades and turned off the neon rose, and the diner went from a public place to a private one, the way a church does after the last car leaves the lot.
The waitress had taken off her apron. Underneath the pink uniform she was wearing a man's flannel shirt, and she had let her hair down out of its pencil, and it fell past her shoulders, dark red at the ends and, at the roots, Walt saw now, the color it had always been: a light ashy brown, Marian's color. She stood at the long steel table in the kitchen with a ten-pound sack of flour and a can of Crisco and a bowl of ice water, and Josie stood on an upturned milk crate beside her in an apron that went down to her shoes.
Walt sat on a stool in the kitchen doorway with a cup of coffee going cold in his hands. Earl had gone out the back to have a cigarette and had not come back in, and Walt understood that he was not going to.
"You cut the shortening in," the waitress was saying, "until it looks like little peas. Not mashed. Peas. The peas are what make it flaky. They melt in the oven and leave little pockets. If you mash it all smooth, you get a crust like a shoe."
"Like a shoe," Josie repeated, delighted, working the pastry blender with both hands.
"My mother taught me that."
Walt's coffee cup made a small sound against the saucer.
The waitress did not look up. She sprinkled ice water over the bowl with her fingers. "A tablespoon at a time. You never pour it. You sprinkle. Like you're baptizing it." Josie sprinkled. "Good. Now you just bring it together with your hands. Don't knead it. You're not making bread. You're just asking it to hold hands."
"Mama said that," said Walt. His voice came out rough. "Marian. 'You're just asking it to hold hands.' She said it to the kids at the kitchen table, every Thanksgiving."
The waitress stopped. Her hands were in the bowl, white with flour to the wrist. She stood like that a long moment. Then she said, very quietly, to Josie, "Can you roll that out for me, honey? Start from the middle and push out. Gentle. I'll be right back."
She wiped her hands on a towel and came to the doorway and stood in front of Walt. Up close, without the apron and the pencil and the name tag, she was not a stranger at all. She was a woman of thirty-five with Marian's hair under the dye and his own mother's long jaw and the gray eyes that had come down from God knew where, from some Brandt in Schleswig-Holstein in the eighteen hundreds, and had skipped Jimmy and landed on her.
"You know," she said.
"Your name isn't Lena."