They ate. He kept his book open but did not pretend to read it anymore. He asked her questions, and they were good ones, which was inconvenient. He did not ask where she was from; he asked what she missed about it. ("Tule fog," she said, surprising herself. "Sacramento. The fog comes up off the ground in the winter so thick you can't see your own feet. You walk to school through a cloud. Here the fog comes in from the ocean and goes away again by lunch. It's a tourist fog. It's for pictures.") He did not ask whether she liked her job; he asked what the best day of it had ever been, and she thought about it longer than she meant to, and said, "The day nobody noticed me at all, and I got every word," and he looked at her across the meatloaf with an expression she could not quite file.
"That's a sad answer," he said.
"It's a professional answer."
"It's a sad professional answer."
"Your best day, then."
"Easy. Last March. Hyde Street, coming down to the Wharf, and you know how the Bay opens up in front of you at Hyde and Chestnut, it's like somebody pulled a sheet off a painting. There was an old man on the front step, maybe eighty-five, came all the way from Lebanon, Kansas. Shipped out of here in 'forty-four, and the last thing he saw was a cable car going up Hyde Street. Swore if he came back alive he'd ride it. Took him forty-four years." Remy shrugged. "I let him ring the bell at the top. He rang it for about a block and a half. Nobody minded. A whole car of people from Germany clapped."
Mina found she had stopped eating.
"You see," Remy said. "That's a happy answer."
"You talk too much," she said, but more gently than she had intended.
"I know. My mother used to say I was born in the middle of a sentence." He looked at the clock over the pie case, a big round Coca-Cola clock whose second hand ran slightly fast, so that in Tillie's it was always a little later than it was. "And I have to go. One-twenty-five. I'm a man of my word." He fished his wallet out of his back pocket and put down a five and two ones, which was too much, and stood up, and stood there for a second by the end of the booth with Moby-Dick under his arm, looking down at her.
"It's not an accordion," he said.
"No."