Ayanna said she had enrolled at Gateway for the fall, in pastry, part-time, nights, and that she was three hundred and ten dollars short of the first semester and was going to have it by August if it killed her, and that if anybody tried to give it to her she would not speak to them again. She looked at Moira when she said that. Moira put up both hands.
Mr. Varghese was in the end booth. He had found her somehow, two weeks after she started, and now he came on Sundays, and ordered tea and tomato soup and read the obituaries forward, and on the first Sunday Moira had brought him a slice of pie without asking and then stood beside his booth and asked him, plainly, whether he would like it put in the book or whether he would like to pay for it himself, and he had looked up at her with his wet, kind eyes and said that his wife would have wanted him to pay for his own pie, and that it was about time.
The bell over the door rang. A man came in out of the rain, maybe fifty, in a soaked canvas jacket with a backpack, and stood on the mat dripping, letting his eyes catch up to the light. He looked at the pie case. He looked at the menu board over the grill, at the right-hand column. He sat down two stools from Nyla and took a handful of change out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the counter and began, without seeming to know he was doing it, to sort it with one finger into little piles.
Moira felt it happen in her chest, the old closing, like a hand.
She looked at the man and his piles of change. She looked at the green notebook on the shelf under the register, swollen with steam, its lines struck through in a dozen hands. She looked at the back booth, where Gerri Plaskett sat with her glasses on their chain and her ledger open, totting up the week.
Ayanna was watching her over the rim of her coffee cup. She did not say anything. She just watched, the way she had watched across table nine, weighing.
Moira set down the coffee pot. She poured the man a cup of coffee, and put a menu in front of him, and said, "Take your time." Then she wiped her hands on her apron and walked down to the end of the counter, toward the back booth, and Gerri looked up from her numbers as she came.