"It isn't like anything."
"Honey," said Hettie, "everything is like something."
On Wednesday it rained, the first rain of the season, a warm gray drizzle that came in off the ocean in the middle of the morning and put a shine on Larkin Street and drove every clerk and bailiff and parking-ticket appellant in the Civic Center indoors for lunch. Tillie's was full to the walls. The windows steamed. There was no stool at the counter. There was no stool anywhere. When Mina came in, shaking out her umbrella, Remy was in the last booth with the gray whale, and there was not a single other square foot of seating in the building, and he looked at her across the crowded room with an expression of perfect helpless apology, and began, slowly, to stand up, with his plate.
"Sit down," Hettie told him, sweeping past with four plates up her arm. "Both of you. I don't have time for this. It's raining."
He sat down. Mina stood there.
"There's no law against eating," Hettie said, over her shoulder. "Is there a law against eating?"
There was not, Mina reflected, a law against eating. There was only a law against talking. She went to the booth and slid in across from him and set the gray case on the seat beside her, and he moved his plate an inch closer to the wall, and neither of them said a word.
It was the strangest lunch of her life. It was, she would think much later, possibly the most intimate. They sat eighteen inches apart for forty-five minutes in the steam and clatter of Tillie's with the rain running down the window and the fan wobbling overhead and the jukebox playing whatever it wanted, and they did not speak, and they did not look at each other, and she had never in her life been so aware of another person's elbows. She ate her tuna melt. He ate a bowl of Spiro's minestrone and two packets of oyster crackers, which he crumbled into the soup with a kind of slow, thoughtful violence. He read his book. She read the Chronicle, folded to Herb Caen's column, and did not absorb one three-dot item of it. Once, the fan sent a napkin skating across the table from her side to his, and he put out one finger and stopped it, and then, after a moment's thought, slid it back to her with the same finger, very precisely, to the exact center of her side of the table. It was not a word. It was not a note. It was not a nod. It was, she supposed, within the instruction. She did not look up. But she put her hand flat on the napkin, and kept it there for the rest of the meal, and could feel him not looking at her hand.
When he left, he turned the page.
She saw him do it. She could not help seeing him do it; she had been watching the page for forty-five minutes. Page three hundred and twelve became page three hundred and thirteen. He did it with a small, private air of ceremony, like a man crossing a border, and then he closed the book and put down his money and went out into the rain.
After that, there was a system. Nobody devised it. It simply occurred, the way paths occur across a lawn. On dry days, whoever arrived at Tillie's second took the counter, and on rainy days they shared the booth, and since it was the autumn of 1988 and the city was having one of its strange wet Septembers, they shared the booth a good deal. Hettie stopped asking questions and started bringing his coffee and her iced tea at the same time, on the same trip, with the ostentatious neutrality of a referee. The men from Public Works began to refer to the last booth as the Library.