He turned to go back to his post and this time I grabbed his arm. “Wait a second. Are you telling me, all these people here, they’re eating potentially contaminated food?”

Paul shrugged. “Yeah, they are. But they’re not my dad.”

“Paul, cheeseburg—hamburger disease can kill people. It’s that E. coli virus or whatever. You can’t mess around with that. If these people are eating this stuff, they’ve got to be told. Has anyone been sick yet?”

“Some guy came in a while ago, said he got a bad burger at lunch, felt like he was gonna puke. He talked to Conan over there,” he nodded toward the woman on the register, “and she practically threw him out the door. She’s a fucking linebacker.”

I swallowed hard. My mouth was starting to feel very dry. Paul could see that I was pondering what to do.

“What?” he said. “What are you thinking?”

There was an elderly couple at one table, cutting a burger in half with a plastic knife. At the next table, a guy who looked like some sort of city worker, orange vest and jeans, hard hat on the seat next to him, chowing down on a double burger. And then, two tables over from him, a mother with two small children. She was unwrapping the foil covering on burgers for each of them.

“Kids,” I said, to myself as much as to Paul.

He looked around. “What?” he said.

“Kids can die,” I said. “They can die from hamburger disease. It can cause kidney failure.”

Paul’s eyes were getting wild with panic. “Jesus, Dad, what are you going to do?”

I was feeling pretty panicked myself. What, exactly, was I planning to do?

And then I just acted, without even thinking. I took a few steps over to the mother feeding her kids, bent down, and said to her quietly, “Don’t give them that.”

She looked at me, pulled back in surprise. “Excuse me?”

Paul, behind me, said, “Dad, what the hell are you—”

“The burgers,” I said, ignoring him. “Don’t let them eat the burgers. They had a power failure here. There might be a risk of E. coli and—”

“Oh my God,” she said, reaching across the table and grabbing the burgers out of her children’s hands.

“Mouuum!” one whimpered angrily.

The guy in the orange vest turned around, looked at me. “What did you say?”

“I just, I heard, the burgers, they may not be safe to eat,” I whispered urgently.

“Fuck,” he said.

The mother whirled around. “Do you mind?” She nodded toward her small children.

The guy in the vest turned around and tapped the older woman, the one sharing a burger with her elderly husband, and whispered something to her. He pointed at me, and when the woman caught my eye, I nodded.

“Dad,” Paul said.

“Thank you so much for telling me,” the mother said. “We come here all the time, although the kids usually want to go to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal and—”