Coralee went back to the kitchen. The timer on the shelf said four minutes. Benicio had finished with the grill and was sitting on an upturned pickle bucket by the back door smoking one of the thin black cigarillos Encarna did not know about, and he looked at Coralee's face and raised his eyebrows a sixteenth of an inch, which was Benicio for a whole paragraph.
"Grandpa and a little girl," she said. "Sixty-one cents."
He blew smoke out through the screen. "It's cold out there."
"I know it."
"Kids, they shouldn't be on the road at one in the morning."
"I know it, Benicio."
He looked at the oven. He did not say anything else. He did not need to. It was her pie. Everything about it was hers, by the arrangement they had made in September of 1980, the time and the oven and the can and the slice at two-forty, and Benicio would no more have suggested what she should do with it than he would have suggested what she should do with her paycheck. That was why he looked at the oven and not at her.
The timer went. She took the pie out. The mountains had come out the way she liked them, the points dark brown, almost burnt, and the valleys between them the pale gold of a palomino, and the whole kitchen smelled of hot sugar and clove. She set it on the rack by the screen door to cool. Usually she let it sit until two-forty. It cut cleaner cold, and the custard set up firm. But Coralee looked at it for a long minute and then at the clock, which said one-fifty-two, and then she got down a plate.
She cut her slice. Her slice, the one she would have eaten at the counter at two-forty with a cup of coffee while the hour went by. She did not cut it bigger than she usually did. It was important to her, for reasons she could not have explained to anybody but her sponsor, that she not cut it bigger. She put it on the plate and got three forks out of the bin, and then she stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the counter for a second with the plate in her hand, because it came to her that she had not shared this slice of pie with another living person in three years and two months, and she did not know what that meant, or if it meant anything.
Then she went out and set it down in the middle of the booth table, with the three forks around it like the hands of a clock.
"This isn't on the menu," she said, before the old man could open his mouth. "This is mine. I bake one every night and I eat a piece on my break, and tonight I'm not real hungry. It's sour cream raisin. It's still warm so it'll be a little runny. I'd be obliged if you'd help me with it."