The woman held her eyes for a moment longer, and then something in her face eased, not into a smile, but into a kind of acknowledgment, like two people who had been carrying opposite ends of a couch and had finally agreed which way to turn it.
"Thank you," she said. "Then I owe you. What's your name? Your whole name."
"Moira. Moira Szafran. You don't owe me anything."
"How do you spell that?"
Moira spelled it. The woman took a pen out of the front pocket of her backpack and pulled a paper napkin out of the dispenser and wrote it down, in small, neat capitals, MOIRA SZAFRAN, HEARTHSTONE WASH AVE, and under it, after glancing at the menu, a column of numbers. She added them in her head and wrote the total at the bottom and drew a line under it. Then she folded the napkin in quarters and put it in her pocket.
"I'm Ayanna," she said. "Ayanna Cutler. This is Nyla."
"Hi, Nyla," Moira said.
"Hi," said Nyla. She looked at her mother. "Can I eat now?"
"Say thank you to Miss Moira first."
"Thank you, Miss Moira."
"You're welcome, honey."
Nyla ate the way children eat when they are hungrier than they have admitted to anybody, including themselves: fast at first, and then, after about a third of the sandwich, slowing down and looking around as if she had just remembered she was in a restaurant. Ayanna ate the pot pie in small, deliberate bites. She ate all of it. She ate the saltines too, two packets, and put the other two in the Walgreens bag.
Later, when the family of five had gone and the truckers had paid and Mr. Varghese had folded his paper into a neat rectangle and left two dollars under his saucer, the way he did every night, Moira came back to table nine with the check folder and set it down face-up so they could see it said six forty-nine.
Ayanna took a debit card out of her wallet and put it in the folder. Moira ran it at the terminal.
It came back declined.
She stood there for a second at the terminal with her back to the room. Then she ran it again, because sometimes the reader was just being a reader. Declined. She went back to the table and crouched down beside it so that she was at Ayanna's eye level rather than standing over her, and she said, very quietly, "It's not going through. It's probably our machine, it's been weird all week."
Ayanna closed her eyes for a second. Not long. When she opened them she was already reaching into the Walgreens bag.
"It's not your machine," she said. "We've been at the Extended Stay up the road since Saturday. Our building on Racine Street had a pipe go on the fourth floor, the whole back stairwell's a glacier, the city put a placard on the door. Red