Chapter 19

She walked into Demetri’s at six-thirty on a Monday.

She wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt and flat black shoes, and she had her hair pulled back in a low ponytail without the scarf because the scarf was a watching tool and this was not a watching morning. The red showed. She had decided two weeks earlier, on Stephanie’s instruction running underneath the decision, that the red would show from the first day. He will see you when he sees you. The hair is not a trick. The training is the trick. Let him see the hair on day one.

Demetri was behind the counter wiping down the espresso machine with a rag that had been white once. He looked up when the bell over the door rang.

“You looking to eat or looking to work.”

“Work.”

“Sit.”

She sat at the third stool from the end. He finished the espresso machine. He took a cup off the back shelf and poured her coffee without asking and set it in front of her. He looked at her for a count of about four seconds.

“You waited tables before.”

“Two summers. Diner in my town. Breakfast and lunch shift.”

“You drop things.”

“No.”

“You talk too much.”

“No.”

“You here for the money or for some other reason.”

She let the second question sit a moment. Stephanie had told her Demetri would ask something like it. Stephanie had told her not to lie and not to answer it either.

“I’m here for the work.”

He nodded once, slowly, like a man who had heard that answer enough times in thirty-one years to know what it meant and what it did not mean. He did not ask anything else.

“Six days. Off Sundays. Five-thirty to two. Cash tips are yours. Credit tips I pool and split Friday. You start tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at her again. The sir had registered. He let it pass without comment, the way a man who has run a diner for thirty-one years lets most things pass, but his eye sharpened by a hair before it released her. He had heard that sir before too. Not often. He knew what it meant when it was real.

“Tomorrow. Five-thirty.”

“Yes, sir.”

She finished the coffee. She paid for it. He pushed the money back across the counter. She left it. He left it. The transaction was understood on both sides. She walked out of the diner at six-forty-one with a job and a uniform she would buy that afternoon and the second-to-last item on Stephanie’s fifth list crossed off in her head.

The next morning at five-thirty she was in the kitchen of Demetri’s tying an apron.

The first week was the first week. She learned the menu. She learned the booths and the counter and which tables belonged to which station and the rotation that determined who got which station on which morning. She learned the regulars by face before she learned them by name. She learned that the line cook was a man named Hector who did not speak much and did not need to be spoken to and ran his grill the way a man runs a thing he has run for twenty years. She learned that the other waitress on the morning shift was a woman in her fifties named Renata who had been at the diner for eleven years and who looked at Kiya on the first day and on the second day and on the third day and then nodded once on the fourth day and decided, on whatever internal grounds Renata used to make these decisions, that Kiya was acceptable. They worked the floor together from then on without friction.

Nathan came in on the second Tuesday of her first week.

She had known he would. She had built the week around it. The rotation had her on the counter that morning and she had asked Renata on Monday afternoon if they could swap the booths for Tuesday and Renata had looked at her once, the way Demetri had looked at her at the interview, and had said sure honey without asking why. So Kiya had the booths on Tuesday. Nathan came in at seven-oh-four. He sat in the booth he always sat in, third from the back on the right side, facing the door. He opened his paper before he had taken off his coat.

She walked to the booth at seven-oh-five with the coffee pot and a cup.

She set the cup down without rattle. She poured. She filled the cup to the top. She remembered he drinks hus coffee black, and had watched him take it for seven months from across two streets and a coffee shop window. She set the pot on the table on the side away from his paper. She did not speak.

He looked up at her.

He looked at her for two seconds and then back at the paper. The two seconds were a registering. She knew what a registering felt like from the receiving end because Stephanie had described what registering felt like from the giving end, in the hospice, in the second month. He will look at you once. Twice if he is tired and his guard is down. The first look is the photograph. He will keep that photograph for the rest of his life and not know he has it. Nathan had taken his photograph. She walked away from the booth without a wasted motion.