She came in the way people come in from that kind of rain, sideways, shouldering the door, and then she stood on the mat and dripped. She was small, not much over five feet, and she had on a man's coat, an old brown canvas work coat with a corduroy collar, much too big for her, the sleeves rolled twice at the wrist. On her head was one of those clear plastic rain bonnets that tie under the chin, the kind they used to give away free at the beauty shop, and under it her hair was white and set in tight curls that the wet had started to undo. She had on men's rubber boots, the kind with the red line around the top that dairymen wear. She carried a black handbag over her arm the old-fashioned way, crooked in her elbow, and she held it pressed against her side like it had something alive in it.
"Good morning," I said. "Sit anywhere you like. It's not exactly standing room only."
She looked down the row of booths, and there was something in the way she looked that I noticed even then, though I didn't know what it meant. She didn't look at them the way a stranger looks at a room, deciding. She looked like someone checking that the furniture was still where she'd left it. Then she walked down past Eino, past the jukebox, past the coat hooks, to the fifth booth, the one by the window with the crack in the vinyl that Toivo had patched with red electrical tape, and she sat down on the side facing the door and set her handbag on the table in front of her and put both hands flat on top of it.
I brought her a menu and a glass of water and the coffee pot, because nobody who came in out of that day didn't want coffee. She untied the rain bonnet with fingers so stiff with cold it took her three tries, and folded it in half and in half again and put it in the pocket of the big coat. Up close she was older than I'd thought, seventy-five at least, with a fine, soft face gone to wrinkles like tissue paper that's been folded too many times, and very pale blue eyes, and a little silver cross on a chain at her throat. She smelled of rain and cows and, under that, Jergens lotion. Her hands were red and swollen at the knuckles.
"Coffee?" I said.
"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.