The snow came in off Lake Michigan sideways that Tuesday, the way it always did in the second week of February, and by seven-thirty the parking lot of the Hearthstone Family Grill on Washington Avenue had gone from black to gray to a soft, unbroken white that made the cars look like loaves rising under a dish towel.
Moira Szafran watched it through the front glass while she rolled silverware at the server station.
She rolled the way her hands had learned to roll over eleven years in three different restaurants: napkin on the diagonal, fork and knife and spoon laid in at the corner, fold, tuck, roll, and a paper band snapped around the middle with a thumbnail. She could do forty in ten minutes without looking down. Tonight she looked down anyway, because if she kept looking at the lot she would start counting how many tables she was not going to get.
Tuesdays were slow. Snow Tuesdays were dead. There were two truckers at the counter splitting a slice of French silk pie and an argument about the Bucks, a family of five in the big round booth by the window working through the Tuesday kids-eat-free special with the grim efficiency of people who knew exactly what the special was worth, and an old man named Mr. Varghese who came in every night at six and ordered tea and a cup of tomato soup and read the Journal Times from the obituaries forward. That was it. Dacia, the other server on the floor, had already asked twice if she could be cut, and Abe had said not yet, and then not yet again, in the voice he used when the answer was going to be yes in twenty minutes but he needed to look at the labor screen first.
Abe Pellegrino had been the general manager of the Washington Avenue Hearthstone for four years. Before that he had owned his own place, a little red-sauce Italian spot on Douglas Avenue called Pellegrino's that had lasted nineteen years and then lasted no more, in the spring of 2020, along with a lot of other little places on a lot of other avenues. Moira had eaten there once, years ago, on a date with a man she no longer thought about. She remembered the bread, which had been very good, and the fact that a big man with a dish towel over his shoulder had come out of the kitchen to ask how everything was, and had meant the question. She had not connected that man to Abe until her second month at Hearthstone, when he