"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.
"Toivo," I said, "drop me a short stack."
He didn't look up. "Ticket?"
"I'll write it later."
He looked up then. He had very small, very light eyes, like a gull's, and they went past me through the pass-through to booth five and rested there for about the time it took to turn a pancake, and came back.
"Boysenberry," he said. It wasn't a question.
"What?"
"She'll want the boysenberry." He was already ladling batter. "Get it out of the walk-in. The good jar. Not that maple-flavored garbage."
I didn't understand him then. I thought he was just being Toivo, who believed that the maple-flavored syrup we bought by the gallon was the beginning of the end of Western civilization and kept a few jars of boysenberry put up by Irja's sister in Svensen for customers he approved of. I went and got the jar from the walk-in, cold and purple-black, and put some in a little steel pitcher and set it on the warmer to take the chill off, and by the time I'd done that the stack was up, three cakes the size of saucers, golden, the edges just barely lacy, with a square of butter going soft on top.