The girl squints evilly her way. Then, her eyes slide toward me and begin taking note of me for the first time. They hesitate on my face as I eat, carefully. She knows something. On her wrist she has a strange, slug-sized, delicate tattoo and her fingernails have the chipped faded remnants of black fingernail polish. It is all I can do to keep spooning food into my mouth.

You’re from LA? she says.

Sort of.

What do you mean sort of?

Santa Monica.

Is that your Olds on the back of the tow truck?

Heads turn towards the window to the truck where the Olds sits high upon its back, bright as a seashell’s interior.

Why’d you paint the chrome white like that? she says after not getting a response.

No reason.

Well, there must be some reason.

Because it looks good.

No it doesn’t.

She expects an answer. The tow truck man pretends to study his sandwich.

Let the boy eat, her mother interrupts.

The girl says something unkind and gets up and leaves the room, thank God. The waitress looks after her and picks up her glass and silver and drops them clattering into a dish bucket and mumbles something about the ignorance of young people but seems visibly relaxed now. The man is deadly still. The sandwich remains uneaten on his plate. The waitress mumbles something about the girl being a little bitch and the man excuses himself and goes into the bathroom. She looks after him, her rag hanging limply in her hand. When he comes back she asks if I am old enough for coffee, and the man answers yes for me, and she flips over the cups and fills them both. It smells good and warm and you can take the aroma in deeply.

That’s it kid, he says. Drink up.

He takes me around the booths and introduces me to the people he knows as I follow him around. Something about this feels weird, like maybe it is the way a man would show off his son, and as people look at me curiously I wonder if they know about the dead daughter. He seems to expect me to stand beside him like a statue on display. But as we move around the tables I find myself not minding that he would introduce me like this. Maybe I even feel a little proud, keeping close beside him as men reach out and shake my hand, or just nod at me. To those people he does not know, the waitress introduces us with a few sharp words, giving each man a sarcastic title, making them chuckle. In the corner booth he makes references to the gangs my mother has to endure. When he refers to Mexicans, an old man whose hand shakes from age as it holds a cigarette looks away from him as if from embarrassment. The old guy taps his cigarette and stares out the window.