"I'm *only* going to be hungry for half."
The waitress came back with the coffee and the chocolate milk and stood with her pad. The jukebox finished its song and clicked, and the arm swung, and a new record dropped, and the woman with the cracked voice started again. *Crazy,* she sang. *Crazy for feeling so lonely.*
Walt felt something in his chest give a quarter-turn, like a key in a lock that had rusted.
"Just the grilled cheese for her," he said. "And the coffee's fine for me."
The waitress wrote it down. She did not ask if he was sure. She looked at the pad a moment, and then she looked at Josie, who was pulling the napkin out of her parka pocket, the old one, with the cold triangle of grilled cheese folded inside it, and setting it on the table next to her grandfather's coffee cup without a word, the way a cat brings you a bird.
Lena watched the little girl do that. Something moved across her face and was gone.
"Coming right up," she said, and walked away very straight.
* * *
The grilled cheese came on a thick white plate with a pickle spear and a handful of potato chips and a paper cup of applesauce, and Josie looked at it with the frank love of the very young and the very hungry.
Behind it, on a second plate, came a hot beef sandwich.
It was the real thing, the kind Walt had not seen since the café in Atlantic closed in 1981: two slices of white bread laid open-faced and heaped with roast beef cut thick, a mound of mashed potatoes with a crater pressed into the top with the back of a spoon, and over all of it brown gravy, poured until it ran off the bread and pooled at the rim of the plate. Steam came off it. A pat of butter was melting in the potato crater like a small sun going down in a well.
The waitress set it in front of him.
"I didn't order this," Walt said.
"I know you didn't."
"Ma'am, I said coffee."
"You did." She put a fork and knife beside the plate, rolled in a paper napkin. "Cook made too much roast for the noon rush. It's going to the hogs if somebody doesn't eat it. It's on the house."