I put the ticket up. Toivo took it and looked at it and set it on the rail and made the pancakes, three of them, the size of saucers, golden, with the edges just barely lacy. He made them exactly as perfect as the ones he'd made Edna that morning, none of the small mean things a cook can do to a man he doesn't like. He set the plate in the window without a word and went back to the grill. I went to the walk-in and got the jar of boysenberry, the good jar, and poured it in the little steel pitcher, and I stood there a second with the can of Reddi-wip in my other hand.
I couldn't do it. I put the can back in the walk-in. I carried the plate and the pitcher out and set them in front of him.
He looked at the pancakes. He looked at me. "No whipped cream?"
"We're out," I said.
He held my eyes for a second. Then he smiled, and picked up his fork. "That's okay," he said. "I'm too old for it now anyway."
He ate the way young men eat, fast, hunched, elbows out, in big bites, and when he was done he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and then on the napkin, and he sat back on the stool and put his hand flat on his stomach and said, "Man. That's just how I remember it. You tell the cook that's just how I remember it."
"I'll tell him."
He reached into his back pocket for his wallet. When he opened it I could see a lot of twenties. He took out a ten and laid it on the counter, and put his cap on, and stood up. The check was a dollar thirty-five.
"Keep it," he said.
I looked at the ten. I knew whose it was. I knew exactly whose it was, I'd read the passbook, I'd seen the column of numbers going down. I knew that ten dollars was a piece of twenty years of eleven-dollar deposits from a milk check, a piece of somebody's Christmas money and burial money and new hip money, and he'd put it on my counter like a man tipping a bellhop.
"That's too much," I said.
"Naw," he said. "You've been good to me. You and Jodie both. Hey, listen —" and he leaned his hands on the counter, and lowered his voice, friendly, confiding, like a son-in-law. "If my gramma does turn up. I'd sure appreciate you giving me a call out at the house before you do anything else. Before you call anybody official, I mean. She gets scared of uniforms. And whatever she tells you — you know. You have to take it with a grain of salt. She's not herself. She'd tell you I was Jack the Ripper if she got the idea in her head." He smiled. "You know how it is with old people. They get things mixed up."
"I know how it is," I said.