"Would you sit down for a minute?"
I looked up the counter. Eino was reading the Daily Astorian with his glasses on the end of his nose. The Coast Guard boys were eating. Irja was at the register counting the drawer. Nobody needed me. Still, you don't sit down in a booth with a customer. It isn't done. Toivo had one rule about the help and it was that.
"I really shouldn't," I said.
"I know," she said. "Please."
So I sat. I slid into the other side of booth five with the coffee pot still in my hand, and I set it on the table on a napkin so it wouldn't mark, and she watched me do it.
"You're Arlene," she said.
My name was on a tag on my uniform, so that wasn't anything. But she didn't say it like she'd read it. She said it like she'd known it a while and was checking.
"That's right."
"Arlene Hakala. You've worked here since nineteen sixty-two."