He took a slow sip from the glass, and found he wasn’t used to that, either. The alcohol he drank over the years seemed to have singed his taste buds to the point where everything he either ate or drank was just as dull as the colors he surrounded himself with. As the juice flowed over his tongue and down his throat his mouth suddenly came back to life, and it brought a genuine smile to his face. “You can always tell how good a restaurant is,” he finally remembered Annie saying. “By how good their orange juice tastes.” That made him smile, too.

Henry began eating his breakfast in the same fashion he’d eaten every other sit down meal over the last several years. He leaned his head and upper body far over the table, wrapped his left arm around his plate and shoveled food in his mouth as quickly as he could with the fork in his right hand. It was a habit some cowboys would get into from time to time while having a meal with others of their like. It wasn’t uncommon in some camps to turn to talk with the cowboy next to you, only to turn back to your plate and find food missing. That had never happened to Henry, and he wasn’t about to let it. His good meals were far and few between and he wasn’t going to let any of it go to someone else.

He had quickly shoveled several mouthfuls in this fashion when he heard Audrey’s voice. “Its just me and you in here, cowboy,” she called from across the room. “And I already ate.” He stopped shoveling and slowly looked up to see Audrey standing by the cash register, wiping out the inside of a drinking glass with a white towel and giving him a wry smile. “Honest, I won’t take it.”

Feeling more than a little silly, and looking a lot like a ground squirrel with its mouth full of pine nuts, Henry came to a little more upright sitting position and very slowly began to chew his food. Audrey nodded her approval, placed the glass she was wiping under the counter, took out another and began cleaning it. “There,” she smiled. “Isn’t that a little better?”

For the first time in a long time, Henry slowly ate the rest of his meal. Between bites he would look out the window and watch cars go by, most probably heading to I-80, which was only a half-mile or so to the north. From there the drivers could be heading to Reno, Sacramento or San Francisco to the west, or Wendover, Salt Lake City, or Cheyenne to the east. Henry had even heard once that if a man went far enough east on I-80, he could end up clear over in New York if he wasn’t careful. That wasn’t something Henry was likely to do anytime soon.

Over the past several years, Henry realized, he had been eating simply because he needed to stay alive. Enjoying the meal never entered into it, not that he ate many meals that were all that enjoyable in the first place. Once in a while he had run across a camp cook that took pride in what he did. But for the most part, the cooks were old, broke down cowboys who couldn’t ride fence anymore. In order to maintain their way of life they became the cook for whatever outfit they worked for at the time, and usually with no more training in culinary arts than the horses they used to ride. So in a sense, getting through a meal as quickly as possible was actually something a lot of hands did almost in self-defense.