"In my booth," she said.
On Tuesday, at ten minutes past twelve, he was already in it.
She saw him through the front window before she opened the door: the dark untidy head bent over the gray whale, the plate of something in front of him, the coffee. She stood on the sidewalk on Larkin Street with her case in her hand while people stepped around her, and considered the problem with the cold, procedural part of her mind that was good at problems. Then she pushed open the door, and the bell jangled, and he looked up.
He did not say anything. That was the first thing. He looked at her for exactly as long as it took to understand that she was there, and then, without a word, he gathered up his plate and his cup and his book and his silverware and his napkin, slid out of the booth, and carried everything to the counter, where a man from the Assessor's office had just vacated the stool nearest the pie case. He set his things down. He sat. He opened the book. He did not look back.
Hettie, at the coffee urn, watched the whole operation with her mouth slightly open.
Mina walked to the last booth and sat down in it. It was warm where he had been sitting. She noticed that, and then she made herself stop noticing it.
"Tuna melt," Hettie said, arriving. It was not a question. Then, lowering her voice: "Honey. What did you do to that man?"
"Nothing. I can't talk about it."
"You can't talk about it? What is this, the CIA?"
"It's the Superior Court of California."
Hettie looked at her, and then over her shoulder at the counter, where Remy Agostini was reading Moby-Dick with the fierce concentration of a man pretending to be a statue, and then back at Mina. Something in her lined, rouged, sixty-three-year-old face rearranged itself into an expression of immense and dawning delight.
"Oh," said Hettie. "Oh, I see. It's like that."