Somebody noticed. She heard the stool at the counter creak, and footsteps, and then nothing; he had not sat down. He did not speak. A hand came into the edge of her vision, a hand with a white scar shaped like a comma on the back of it, and set down a paper napkin on the table in front of her. Just a napkin. Folded once, square. Nothing written on it. Then the hand went away, and the footsteps went away, and she heard the stool creak again.
She picked up the napkin and wiped her eyes with it and kept it in her fist.
A minute later Hettie came out through the swinging door, banging the back of the booth, carrying a slice of Spiro's lemon meringue pie on a saucer with a single pink birthday candle stuck in the top of it, lit, the flame leaning sideways in the wind of the wobbling fan.
"From the kitchen," Hettie said, setting it down. "Spiro says happy birthday."
"How did Spiro know it was my birthday?"
"Spiro knows things," said Hettie. "He's Greek." And she went away before Mina could ask anything else.
Mina looked at the pie. Then she looked at the counter, where Remy Agostini sat with his back to her, reading Moby-Dick with tremendous concentration, his ears faintly red. She blew out the candle. She ate the pie, every bite, and the meringue was the best she had ever had, and she did not look at him again, because she was a professional, and because if she had looked at him she was not sure what she would have done.
When he left that day, she noticed, he turned two pages.
The jury went out on the thirty-first day of trial, a Thursday, after Sy Feinberg had closed by holding up a loaf of Pane Toscano from a bakery on Columbus Avenue and asking them whether a woman who had made something over a million of those, by his arithmetic, with her own hands, would burn down the only oven in the world that knew how, and Sterling Pratt had closed by reminding them, in his cello voice, that sentiment was not evidence and that floors did not lie. They deliberated for a day and a half.
At two-fifteen on Friday afternoon, Thurston put his head in the door and said, "Verdict," and she went down the stairs so fast she nearly lost a shoe.
The jury found for the plaintiff. The foreman, who turned out to be Mrs. Louie, read it in the voice of a woman who had waited her whole life to read something aloud in a courtroom. Pacific Bastion Mutual was ordered to pay the full value of the policy, plus interest, plus costs, and on a separate question the jury found that the company had denied the claim in bad faith, which meant more money and a phrase that would go into Herb Caen's column on Monday. Mrs. Lucchesi did not cry. She sat very straight in her black hat and closed her eyes and moved her lips, and Sy Feinberg put his rumpled arm around her shoulders. Sterling Pratt asked that the jury be polled, and the clerk asked each of the twelve in turn whether this was their verdict, and each of them said yes, and Mina took down the twelve yeses, one after another, like twelve stitches.