I poured him a milk in the tall glass. We bought the gallon cartons from Isaly's then, and on the side of that one there was a picture of a girl from Indiana, eleven years old, missing since August, and her name, and her height, and HAVE YOU SEEN ME in black letters. They'd started putting the missing kids on milk cartons that year, or the year before, after the little Walsh boy down in Florida, and after Etan Patz in New York who walked to the bus stop and never got there, and I had gotten used to pouring past their faces three hundred times a day. That afternoon I turned the carton around so the girl faced the wall. I didn't want him looking at her while he drank.
Stosh did not burn the grilled cheese. Stosh made the most beautiful grilled cheese of his career, American cheese melted down over the crust edges in a lace, and cut it corner to corner the way kids like it, and ladled the soup out of the well into the good bowl, the one without the chip, and I set them down, and the boy looked at the plate like he didn't trust it to stay there.
Then he ate. Not fast, which surprised me. Hungry kids eat fast. He ate carefully, in small bites, with a napkin in his lap, and between bites he looked around the diner the way I've seen people look around a church they used to go to. At the tin ceiling. At the pie case with its two lemon meringues and a cherry with a wedge out of it. At the specials board and Reagan's grease-pencil mustache. At the framed dollar bill by the register, the first dollar Helen ever made, in 1959, with a ring of coffee on it from some long-ago accident. At the photographs on the wall behind the counter, which were mostly of men in hard hats and softball teams sponsored by the grill, Helen's Grill Hustlers, 1966, 1971, 1974, and one of the Sheet and Tube open hearth crew at Christmas with my own father in the back row, looking like a bear somebody had dressed in a sweater.
And at me. He looked at me a lot. Every time I went past with the coffeepot I felt it on me, a steady, considering look, as if I were a math problem written on the board and he was working it out.
"You go to school around here?" I asked, wiping the counter near him.
"No."
"Where, then?"
He took a bite of grilled cheese and chewed it a long time. "Up the north side."
"Youngstown? That's a long way."
"I took the bus."
"Your mom know you're down here?"