Lindy puts down our platters in front of us, and Chip stuffs a bunch of french fries into his mouth. “Paradise,” he says. “Perfect.” He picks up his saucer-sized burger, admires it, puts it back down on the plate to salt it. “When I was a little boy, about three or four, I guess, I was sitting outside one summer day and I all of a sudden realized that I swallowed my spit. I was just astounded at this, and I ran inside to tell my mother. She said, ‘Oh yes, dear, we swallow our saliva.’ I said, ‘Well, what did we do last year?’”

I laugh, watch him take a huge bite of his burger, then cup his hand beneath it to catch the drippings. I hand him a few napkins.

“I thought nuns were a third sex,” I say, and take a bite not much smaller than Chip’s.

“Okay,” he says. “I thought ‘technical knockout’ was when one man knocked another one out with ‘technique.’”

I laugh so loudly Lindy looks over at me, one hand on her hip.

“Hey Lindy,” I say. “What’s something you used to believe when you were a little kid that turned out to be completely wrong?”

“Everything,” she says.

“Tell me one thing.”

She stands still, thinking.

Al leaves the grill and comes to the counter to tell us, “I thought if I looked into the mirror at my own eyes for too long, I’d go crazy.”

Lindy turns to him. “Huh. Then you must have spent a long time looking. Anyway, she didn’t ask you. She asked me.” She comes over to our table, says in a low voice, “I thought men’s penises were about forty inches long. I swear to God. I thought they folded up like a yardstick so they wouldn’t hang out beneath the cuff of their pants.”

“And?” Chip says.

Lindy looks at Chip for a long moment, then at me. “They’re all like that,” she says. “Pigs.”

“I know it.”

“I know it, too,” Chip says.

“I thought you made babies by lying down and praying together,” Al yells over to us. He flips a pancake up in the air, then turns to point his spatula at Lindy. “Don’t you say a word, either.”

A man at the counter whom I’ve not seen before spins around, coffee cup in hand. He’s wearing a faded blue mechanic’s uniform with “Buzzy” embroidered over the pocket. “I’ll tell you one,” he says. “When I was about six years old, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine cutting a sheet of paper in half. And then cutting that half in half. And so on and so on. And I would make myself cry, because for some reason it frustrated me, thinking that eventually some piece would get cut out of existence, that you could do that. I guess it scared me.”