She stared at him. Her hand on the coffee pot was white at the knuckles. He could see her deciding whether he was the danger. It was a reasonable thing to decide. He was a stranger in a cut-down club vest with prison in his face, and the man he'd just been talking to was somebody she had poured coffee for two hundred times.
The trucker woman spoke up from her booth.
"Honey," she said, "I've been driving thirty-one years. I've seen a lot of men sit in a lot of parking lots. Those two out there aren't waiting on their order." She looked at Hollis. "This one's been sitting where he can see that door since he came in. I'd listen to him."
Renée looked at her. Then at Hollis. Then she set the coffee pot down on the counter, very carefully, as if it might explode, and went into the kitchen.
Hollis heard her voice, and the boy's voice, and the old cook's voice, low and rough. He sat at the counter and looked at the trucker woman, and she got up and came over and sat on the stool next to him.
"Bev Kostelnik," she said. "Out of Johnstown. I'm hauling paper towels to Buffalo, if you can believe it. They don't care if they're late."
"Hollis Teague."
"You really have a bad heart, or was that a line?"
"Really," he said. "Bad valve. They want to put a new one in next month."
"Hell of a night to find out you're a hero," Bev said.
"I'm not anything," Hollis said. "I'm sitting at a counter."
"Mm-hm," Bev said, and helped herself to the coffee pot Renée had left, and poured them both a cup.
When Renée came back out of the kitchen she had her arm around Toby, and she had been crying and stopped, and her face had gone hard in a way Hollis recognized. It was the face of a woman who had spent her whole life being pushed and had just discovered where the wall was.