Coralee slid the pie into the oven, set the timer on the shelf, and wiped her hands on her apron and went out front.
They were standing just inside the door, on the rubber mat, as if they had been told not to come any farther. An old man and a little girl. The man was tall and had been taller, with the kind of long-boned frame that had once carried a lot of weight in the shoulders and had lost it all at once, so that his canvas work coat hung off him like a tarp on a fence post. He had on a feed-store cap that said KENNECOTT over a faded copper-colored emblem, and under the cap his face was the color and texture of a saddle left out in the weather, all creases and cracks, with a white stubble that had gone three or four days. His eyes were very pale blue, almost no color at all. He held the little girl's hand in a way that Coralee noticed right off, because it was not the way a grandfather usually held a child's hand, loosely, ready to let go. He held it like a rope on a cliff.
The girl was five or six. She was wearing a man's quilted hunting vest over a pink sweatshirt with a picture of Strawberry Shortcake on it, and corduroy pants with the knees worn through, and red rubber rain boots, in the desert, in November. Her hair was brown and fine and had been put into two pigtails by somebody who did not know how to put hair into pigtails, so that one was up by her ear and the other was most of the way around the back of her head. She was looking past Coralee, past the counter, at the pie case.
"Evening," Coralee said. "Or morning. Sit anywhere you like."
"We're just wanting a coffee," the old man said. His voice was low and dry and had a rasp at the bottom of it, the voice of a man who had breathed something for a long time that he oughtn't to have. "And a water for her. If that's all right."
"That's all right."
He took the booth by the window, the one nearest the door, and slid the girl in first so that she was against the wall and he was between her and the room. He put both his hands flat on the table and looked at them. Coralee brought the coffee and a glass of water with ice and a straw and two menus, out of habit, and he looked at the menus as though she had set two snakes down in front of him.
"Just the coffee," he said again.
"I'll leave them in case."
When she came back with the cream he had his hand open on the Formica and was counting what was in it with one finger. She did not mean to look. Two quarters. A dime. A penny. Sixty-one cents. The coffee was forty-five. He closed his hand over the money and put it in his coat pocket and looked out the window, where there was nothing to see but the two of them reflected, an old man and a little girl in a lit box on the edge of the dark.
"Where you headed?" Coralee said.