The waitress came over and asked Betty if she wanted coffee and handed out six menus. Betty said Yes and locked eyes with the waitress, a beautiful girl of nineteen or twenty. Betty surveyed her wide liquid eyes and kissing-thick lips and could tell she was a mixed blood. Betty was relieved and visibly relaxed. The waitress turned and walked back to the kitchen and Betty noticed that she was wearing white hospital shoes and figured that she must be a nursing student at the university down the road. Betty turned and looked at Simon who hadn’t taken his eyes off the waitress.

“Gego ganawaabamaaken.”

He blushed and lowered his eyes.

“Don’t bother opening the menu. I’ll order for all of us.”

The children knew this was not an arguing point and acquiesced though the thrill of being in a restaurant for the first time was dulled by being treated as if they were in the school cafeteria.

When the waitress returned, Betty ordered tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches all around. What to drink? Cokes.

The waitress wrote it down and spun away, her bobbed hair flouncing. Simon almost fainted.

Instead, he looked around the diner. Above the windows the old striped wallpaper gave way to fake wainscoting of pressed wood panel. Here and there, at various levels and poses, perched every animal that had ever walked or flown the north woods. Moose heads, deer racks, bobcats gripping driftwood. Pine martens crouched next to glazed piles of partridge feathers. There was a lynx eating a rabbit. Fisher, ermine and hawks roosted at different levels of the canopy. A dusty eagle surveyed the entire menagerie from the corner of the room. Instead of looking at the waitress and exposing himself to ridicule from his mother and brother, Simon looked at each moth-eaten creature one by one. Some appeared predatory, others simply watchful of the traffic of tourists and food below.

“I wonder what they did with their insides,” Simon thought out loud.

Betty sipped her Coke.

“Why’d you think I ordered grilled cheese?”

The girls kicked their legs against the pleathered booth and let out a drawn “Ewwwwww.”

The man in the suit looked at his watch and gently urged his shirt cuff down to his wrist knuckle.

“Hey, buddy. You know what time it is?” asked the man in the far booth.

The suited man looked at his wife, who checked her own watch.

“One-thirty, I believe,” she said with a thick accent.

The man nodded around his French toast and squirreled the syrup-soaked bread into his cheek. His wife peeked at the woman from behind the baby she had lifted on to her lap.

“German, huh? My folks was German.”

The man in the suit shifted to face her. “Was?”

“Well,” She shrugged. “They died.”

“I suppose,” he said in a voice as thick and sharp as cranberry gravy, “I suppose German-ness is something that expires along with life itself.”