"Water's fine," the woman said. She opened the menu and did not read it so much as scan it, and Moira, who had watched a great many people read a great many menus, knew what she was scanning for. Not the food. The right-hand column.
"Can I ask you something," the woman said. "The grilled cheese on the kids' menu. Is that a full sandwich, or a half?"
"It's a full. Comes with fries or applesauce."
"And if I ordered that, could she and I split it? Is there a plate charge?"
"There's no plate charge." There was a plate charge, technically, a dollar fifty, buried in a laminated policy sheet in the back office. Moira had never once charged it. "You want me to put that in?"
The woman looked at her daughter, who had opened her library book on the table and was pretending to read it with tremendous seriousness while listening to every word. Then she looked at the window, where the snow was coming down so thick now that the sign for the Super 8 across the frontage road had gone soft at the edges, like a sign in a dream.
"Yes, please," she said. "Grilled cheese, applesauce. And could I get some extra crackers, if you have them. The little packets."
"You got it."
Moira walked back toward the kitchen. She did not decide anything on the way. That was the thing she would try to explain later, more than once, to more than one person, and never quite manage: there was no moment where she weighed it. She saw the parka zipped halfway, and the mismatched mittens, and the Walgreens bag, which had a box of children's Tylenol in it, she could see the orange through the plastic, and the way the woman had said the little packets, as if she had already worked out that a packet of saltines was free and a side of toast was a dollar ninety-nine, and something in Moira's chest did what it had always done, since she was a girl, which was close like a hand.
At the pass, she punched in the grilled cheese. Then she leaned over the heat lamps and said, "Wendy. You busy?"
Wendy Kramer, who had been working the grill at Hearthstone since before it was Hearthstone, when it was a Country Kitchen and then briefly a place called Flapjack Junction that nobody liked to talk about, looked at the empty ticket rail and then back at Moira with an expression of enormous patience.
"I'm devastated with business," Wendy said. "What do you need."
"Can you fire a chicken pot pie and a cup of chili. And put a real side of fries on that grilled cheese, not the kid portion."