"Raisins," he said. "Ain't had a sour cream raisin since I don't know when."
"It was my grandma's. Out of Lovelock."
"Lovelock." He nodded. "I worked a summer in Lovelock. Forty-six. Hay." He looked at the pie, not at her. "My wife made one. Not like this. Hers didn't have the mountains. She did a lattice on it, like a cherry. People said you couldn't do that with a custard and she said watch me."
"That sounds like a woman who knew her own mind."
"She did."
Coralee should have gone then. But she stood there with her hand on the back of the booth, and the old man sat looking at the pie with his big ruined hands flat on the table, and Dovie ate, small bites now, making it last, and outside a semi went by northbound without stopping, rattling the window in its frame. And then the old man raised his eyes and looked at her. Really looked at her, for the first time since he came in, those pale nearly colorless eyes going over her face and down to her hands and the coffee pot in one of them and then back up to her face again, slow and careful, like a man reading a letter he has been dreading.
"You remind me of her," he said.
Coralee smiled. She thought she knew what he meant. Old men told waitresses they reminded them of somebody about once a week, and it was almost always a wife, and it was almost always a kindness, and you said thank you.
"Your wife?" she said. "With the lattice?"
He shook his head. He did not take his eyes off her.
"No, ma'am," he said. "Her mama."