He looked at his soup. "She's at work," he said, which I noticed was not an answer.
I let it go. You let things go with kids at first, the way you let a cat come to you. I went and marked the pie case for the night and refilled Lefty and Brother, who had progressed from Mondale to the Browns, and when I came back the boy had finished everything, the soup bowl wiped clean with the last crust, and he was sitting with his hands flat on the counter again. He'd stacked the plate on the bowl and set the spoon inside it so that I'd only have one thing to pick up. Somebody had raised him, all right.
"Do you work here every day?" he said.
"Six days. Monday through Saturday. Six to three, mostly, except when Marge's car won't start and then it's six to whenever."
"Since when?"
"Since when what?"
"Since when have you worked here?"
It is a strange question from a child. Children don't usually care about your history; for them the world started the day they were born and you have always been exactly as old as you are. I laughed and said, "Since before you were born, hon. Since nineteen sixty-four. I was a baby myself."
He nodded, as if that confirmed something.
"Do you have kids?" he said.
And there it was. Everybody asks that eventually, the customers, the salesmen, the ladies from the Methodist church who came in on Thursdays for the soup. I had an answer for it that I'd sanded smooth over eleven years, smooth enough to hand to anybody: Not me, I've got enough with my father. Usually I said it with a laugh. That day I opened my mouth to say it, and he was looking at me with those changing eyes, and I said instead, "No," and then, because the word sat there so plain and ugly on the counter between us, "Not anymore."