We followed Laura’s iPad to Leo’s Own Diner, a shining silver imitation railway car directly across a rutted road and a seedy strip mall from Lake Erie. Exactly the kind of place you might run into Jack Reacher. The parking lot was about a third full, which seemed about right for early evening dinner. The handicapped spot at the far end of the parking lot was vacant. Perfect. For me, Leo’s main attraction was its long ramp that rose to a side door.

As we entered, the waitress, a solidly built woman who seemed a bit old for her yellow pinstripe uniform and Converse high-tops, was moving from table to table with a dishrag and a coffeepot. When she saw us, she pulled a chair away from a table and beckoned us over. “I’ll be right with you,” she promised, laying down two menus and continuing her coffee rounds.

While Laura hit the ladies’ room, I glanced around Leo’s Own. The cash register was sitting on the bakery display case, next to the main entrance. A counter ran almost the entire length of the diner, fronted by evenly spaced round swivel seats with glittering red plastic tops. The one directly in front of me had been repaired with gray duct tape. Several booths covered with the same tired red vinyl were built in by the windows facing the road and the mall. At a right angle to the booths were three small square tables. Two flat-screen TVs over the counter were set to a Cleveland Indians game; the sound was off, and the captions were too small for me to read.

We were seated at one of the three tables. I tried but failed to remember the last time I’d slid into a booth. A kid about ten years old, sitting in a booth with his family, was leaning into the aisle to get a better look at Mighty Chair. He had a straw in his mouth, and every few seconds he’d straighten up and say something to a man I assumed was his father. The man responded by looking at me, then playfully slapping the boy’s hand.

The menu offered typical diner fare, any dish made anywhere in the world, from grits to fajitas to moo shu pork, all of it guaranteed delicious and prepared in fifteen minutes. Laura returned; she’d put on pinkish lipstick, taken her hair out of the bun, and added just enough eye shadow to make her appear simultaneously younger and more mature, a woman’s trick I’d never quite figured out. “You know what you want?”

“Everything looks good,” she decided, perusing the menu. She lifted her eyes over the top and caught me staring at her. “So?”

“You can’t,” I said, locking eyes. “Everything is too much.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but it was our waitress who said, “Sorry.” She took a pencil from behind her ear and held it ready by her pad. “What can I do you for?” The greeting Leo Says Hi! with an illustration of a smiling man in a yellow pinstripe shirt waving at us was printed on the name tag pinned to her shoulder. A handwritten slip of paper inserted in it identified her as Midge. Woven leather straps hung from her glasses, as if her face were inside parentheses. Laura asked, “What have you got that’s gluten free?”