The lost woman nodded gratefully. “My name’s Martha Ott.”
“Pleased to meet you, Martha,” Chelle said, and held out her hand.
The lost woman accepted it doubtfully, held it a moment, and released it.
“What would you like for breakfast? I’m having ham and pancakes.”
“Oh, I’ve already eaten breakfast.” The lost woman tittered. “That was hours ago! I just—just wanted a place…”
“Where you could sit down,” Chelle added helpfully.
“Y-yes. And have some tea.”
“And toast? I like toast myself, when I’m not having pancakes.”
“Oh! So do I, ever so much! Cinnamon toast.”
Chelle waved at a waitress. “Martha wants tea and cinnamon toast. Put it on my bill.”
“I don’t know about the cinnamon toast,” the waitress told her. “It’s not on the menu.”
Chelle leveled a finger at her. “Any jerk can make cinnamon toast—it takes about five seconds. You tell your fucking cook we want cinnamon toast, and we want it fast. Now get going!”
The lost woman tittered and the waitress scampered.
“You and me,” Chelle said, “are going to help each other out. You’re going to tell me your troubles, and I’m going to sympathize with you. Then I’m going to tell you mine, and you’re going to sympathize with me. By that time we ought to be through eating, and we’ll both feel a whole lot better.”
“Do you know,” the lost woman said, “you remind me of somebody I went to school with. That’s why I was looking at you.”
Chelle grinned. “She was shot up, too, I guess.”
“Shot up?”
“You ought to see my scars.”
“She—she wasn’t shot. She was captain of the fencing team. Just wonderful at sports, you know. I wasn’t, and I envied her, oh, terribly!”
“Maybe she envied you, too.”
The lost woman cocked her head thoughtfully. “I, well, I really don’t think she did.”
Chelle’s phone played. Telling the lost woman to wait a moment she answered it. “I’m in this place right now. Why don’t you join us when you can get away?”
She listened for half a minute, then said, “Carrera’s. Carrera’s Café. It seems to be pretty cheap and pretty good.”
She listened again. “Okay. Love you! Bye.”
As she shut her phone, the lost woman said, “Your contracto?”
“Not yet. Just a boyfriend. He’s been trying to find me a job, and he’s got something he wants to talk about.”
The lost woman looked stricken. “I suppose I ought to leave.”
“Hell, no. I want you to meet him. Besides it’ll be a while before he shows up, and I need somebody to talk to. What’s troubling you?”
“I—I’m lost, that’s the main thing.…”
“Where are you trying to get to?”
“I know where I am, it’s just that I don’t know what to do.”
While Chelle was nodding sympathetically and sipping her coffee, the waitress arrived with tea, ham, pancakes, and a cruet of syrup. “The cook won’t make you cinnamon toast,” the waitress told them. “He says it’s not on the menu, so he won’t cook it.”
Chelle rose. “I’ll talk to him.”
Another waitress, emerging with a tray from an arch at the back of the café, betrayed the location of the kitchen. A sweating fat man was flipping burgers there while a much smaller man with the furtive manner of the oppressed loaded a dishwasher.
Chelle approached the fat man. “What’s your name?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I was hoping we could be polite about this.” Chelle stepped nearer and her voice hardened. “That’s what I was hoping, but I can play it any way you want, buster. I can have you down on that floor yelling for mercy in less time than it takes a rat to shit.”
“Lady…”
“Shut the fuck up!” Chelle’s left hand gripped her blouse and tore it. “I’ll have you down there, and I’ll start screaming. I’ll say you tried to bite my tits, and by God I’ll have you locked up in an hour. I’ll sign every complaint the cops shove at me, understand? And I’ll cry my eyes out at your trial, and you’ll do ten fuckin’ years easy. Get the picture?”
The cook looked as if he were about to spit, threw his arms up in a gesture that sent his spatula flying, and fell at her feet.
“That was just a sample.” She bent over him, almost whispering. “Make us cinnamon toast, buster. Make it good, and make a lot of it, or I start yelling. Only I mess you up a whole lot more first.”
He groaned.
“Which is it? Cinnamon toast or jail?”
* * *
Grinning, Chelle returned to her booth.
“Goodness!” The lost woman’s eyes were wide. “What happened to you?”
“My shirt?” Chelle glanced down at the tear. “Oh, the cook did that. It doesn’t matter.”
“I think I’ve got a pin…” The lost woman snapped open her purse.
“It’s okay.” Chelle cut a piece of ham and forked it into her mouth. “Tell me about being lost.”
The lost woman did, and at some length, while finding a small safety pin and pinning Chelle’s blouse to her own satisfaction.
“Your kids don’t need you anymore and your contracto never did,” Chelle summed up for her as a heaped platter of cinnamon toast arrived. “You need to be needed. Maybe we all do. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I … Well, I just feel so helpless. And I feel like I ought to die.”
“Do you know about the soldiers in the hospitals?”
The lost woman shook her head.
“If the docs can patch you up in a hundred-day or so, they keep you up there, on whatever crazy planet it is. But the long-term cases get shipped back here. Some of them won’t be well for years. Some won’t ever be, not unless the doctors figure out something new.”
The lost woman’s nod was hesitant and small, but it was unmistakably a nod.
“You said you had two boys. What’re their names?”
“Jack and Jeff … That’s what we call them, I mean. Their real names are Jeffrey and—”
“Doesn’t matter. Jack’s older?”
The lost woman nodded, positively this time. “By two years. We spaced them like that.”
“Okay, let’s suppose Jack went into space. Say that he enlisted at twenty. Jeff was eighteen. Jack’s off fighting for a couple of years, his time. When he comes back, it’s been more than twenty. His folks are dead, and his kid brother’s pushing forty and lives in the EU. Get the picture? Jack’s in some hospital hooked to a bunch of machines, and nobody gives a damn. You’re your Jack’s mother. How about if you go to some of those hospitals and be my Jack’s mother? I’m not going to tell you you’ll get your reward in heaven or any of that shit, because I don’t know. But one day pretty soon you’ll get your reward from my Jack’s eyes.”
Chelle paused, and sighed. “I spent a hundred-day plus in a hospital once, and believe me you will.”
For a time that seemed stretched, the lost woman was silent, nibbling while she watched Chelle eat. At last she smiled. “I … Well, I’m not a forceful woman, but I’m going to do it. I spend hours and hours shopping. Just shopping for nothing, really. Or watching tele. Vic can’t object, but if he does I’m going to do it anyway.”
“Good for you!”
They had nearly finished eating when Mick Tooley came in. He grinned and said, “Hi, Chelle! Who’s your friend?”
Chelle slid over to make room for him. “Martha, this is Mick.” Her right eyelid drooped. “He’s the wonderful boyfriend I was telling you about.”
Tooley produced a card and handed it across the table. “You hang on to this, Martha. Call me anytime you need somebody kept out of jail.”