"How much is it?"
I told her thirty-five cents, with free refills. She nodded and opened the handbag, and I saw her take out a little black change purse, the snap kind, and open it, and pour it into her palm. She counted with one finger. I tried not to look and I looked anyway, because that's the job: you're always looking, always counting other people's coffee cups and other people's money. There was a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and a penny. Forty-one cents. She counted it twice, and then she put the penny and the nickel back in the purse and set the quarter and the dime on the edge of the table, square, like she was laying down a bet.
"Coffee, then," she said. "Thank you."
I poured it. She wrapped both hands around the cup and held it under her chin and closed her eyes and breathed the steam for a while, and I went away and let her do that, because there are some things a person should be allowed to do without a waitress watching. I rolled silverware into napkins at the end of the counter. Out the window the rain was coming across the river in long gray sheets you could actually see, like curtains being drawn, one after another,.
When I went back to her with the pot, she had the menu open and she was looking at the breakfast side with her finger resting under one line. Short stack of buttermilk pancakes, one thirty-five.
She saw me see. She closed the menu.
"Just the coffee," she said. "It's very good coffee."
It wasn't. Toivo bought his coffee in five-pound cans from a restaurant supply in Portland and boiled it to tar by nine every morning. But I said thank you, and I topped her up, and I walked back to the kitchen pass-through and leaned in.
Toivo Huhta was sixty-three that year, a big, slow, quiet man with a gray crew cut and forearms like ham hocks and a white scar across the back of his left hand where a gillnet cable had opened it to the bone in 1951. He cooked the way he'd fished, without talking and without hurry and without ever, as far as I could tell, getting anything wrong. He was standing at the grill scraping it down with a brick.