Wendy did not ask who it was for. She glanced over Moira's shoulder, through the pass, at the two-top along the side wall, and then she reached for the pot pie without a word. Behind her, in the dish pit, Fritzner Desrosiers was running the last rack of the dinner rush through the machine, and he looked up too, the way he always looked up when anybody's voice went quiet in the kitchen, and then went back to his rack.
Moira went to the terminal and did what she had done many times before, with a rhythm her fingers had learned. She rang the grilled cheese to table nine. She rang the pot pie and the chili to the waste screen, under the button labeled REMAKE / QUALITY, and in the reason field she typed wrong temp, which was what she usually typed, because it was the thing that happened most often and nobody ever questioned it.
When the food came up she carried it out on one tray: the grilled cheese with a full basket of fries, a cup of applesauce, the chili with a little cup of shredded cheddar on the side, the pot pie steaming under its crust, and four packets of saltines fanned on a saucer. She set the grilled cheese in front of the girl, and the chili beside it, and the pot pie in front of the woman.
"The kitchen made an extra pot pie by mistake," Moira said. "It'll just go in the trash. And the chili's the same, somebody sent it back. I hate to waste it."
The girl looked at the pot pie, and then at her mother. The mother did not look at the pot pie at all. She looked at Moira, a long, level look, not unfriendly but not grateful either, the look of somebody checking the weight of a thing before she picked it up.
"Ma'am," she said quietly, "please don't lie in front of my daughter."
Moira felt her face go hot. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just..."
"I know what you just." The woman's voice stayed low. "I appreciate it. I do. But she's seven and she reads everything, and she knows a kitchen doesn't make a pot pie by mistake. If you're going to give us something, give it to us. Don't make it trash first."
The girl had stopped pretending to read.
Moira stood there holding the empty tray against her hip. Then she said, "Okay. It's on me. I wanted you to have a hot dinner. That's all it is."