She leaned back and judged the initial reaction on my face. Disliking what she saw, she added in the reproachful tone that still inspired fear within me, “You’d be in one place, Ray. Imagine! Living in the same town for more than two weeks of your godforsaken life.”

I looked around for our waitress, hoping that the delivery of our meal might buy me a few extra beats to figure out my response, but she was nowhere to be seen. “It doesn’t sound like I’d get to play very much, Nancy,” I said. “That means a lot to me, you know. I get to lose myself when I’m playing.”

She was annoyed with me now. “You’ve lost too much of yourself already, Ray. Who does it serve? Who does it help?”

“Me, Nancy. It’s how I get by.”

She sat back in the booth. “Well, the other offer was to do the same job for Sally’s road tour, but I don’t think I’d be doing you any favors there. Tough schedule, crummy accommodations. The only appeal for you is that it would get you even farther off the beaten track. But the Music Box job . . . please, Ray, come along with me back to Treasure Island and at least meet with Sally. You’ve never sat and had a real conversation with her. She’s a swell person.”

So as not to be rude when Nancy obviously was trying her best to help me, I agreed to go with her and discuss the offer with Sally Rand. We decided, since both our waitress and our food had clearly been spirited away by gnomes, to get something quick to eat at the fair.

Nancy signaled to a very distraught man with a big head of shiny black hair who was stationed at the luncheonette’s cash register. He rushed over to us. “Yes, yes?”

“Are you the manager?” Nancy asked.

“I am, sadly, the owner.” He spoke in what I thought might be an Aegean accent, a thick one, whatever it was.

“I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to leave. The service here is very poor,” said Nancy, who rarely complained about anything.

“Not poor, miss. Vanished.” He displayed inexplicable anger toward us. “What did you say to my waitress?”

I intervened. “Hold on a second. We had about as brief an exchange with your waitress as anyone could have. We ordered today’s special and I asked for plain milk with my coffee. She never said a word to us.”

The owner glared at me. “You were the last table she waited on. After that, she went straight into the kitchen and out the back door, so my cook tells me. Out the back door into the street, you understand? In her uniform that I supplied! So I lose the uniform, I lose my waitress, now I am the waitress for the rest of the day.”