"It's a public booth."
"But it's yours. I can tell. You're looking at me like I'm sitting on your coat." He glanced around Tillie's, at the lunch crowd stacked two deep at the counter, the clerks and bailiffs and parking-ticket appellants, the three men from the Department of Public Works arguing about the Giants. "It's the only seat in the place. I'm sorry. I'm only here today, I swear. I'll be out of your life by one-thirty." He slid his plate and his coffee and his paperback over to the far side of the table, against the wall, and put his hands up like a man showing he had no weapons. "Look. Sit. I promise not to bother you."
Mina looked at him for a long moment.
"You already have," she said.
And then, because her feet hurt, and because there was nowhere else to sit, and because the alternative was to carry a twenty-two-pound stenograph machine back up Larkin Street in the heat and eat a pretzel from a cart in the Civic Center Plaza among the pigeons, she slid into the booth across from him, set the gray case on the seat beside her like a chaperone, and picked up the menu she had not needed to read since 1984.
He did not say anything. She would give him that. He went back to his book. Hettie came out through the kitchen door, which banged the back of his seat and made him jump an inch, and looked from one of them to the other with the frank interest of a woman who had been waiting tables on Larkin Street since the Eisenhower administration and had seen everything except this.
"Well," Hettie said. "Isn't this a development."
"It isn't," said Mina. "Tuna melt, please. And iced tea."
"I know what you want, honey. I been bringing you a tuna melt and iced tea for four years. I'm asking about him."
"He's leaving at one-thirty."
"I'm leaving at one-thirty," the man agreed, not looking up.
Hettie went away, humming. The jukebox, which had been resting, came to life on its own in the way it sometimes did, as though Spiro had kicked it on his way to the walk-in, and Tracy Chapman began to sing in that low, plain voice about a fast car and a plan to get out of here. Mina unfolded her napkin. The fan wobbled. The napkin tried to escape, and she trapped it.