“Don’t you want to see the menu…?” the server asked. Winnie’s smile broke for a brief second. Hadn’t this stupid girl heard her? She was trying to be the cool mom. “Just one of everything,” she snapped. The girl nodded and walked away. Her expression said It’s on your dime, salty bitch.

“What are you reading?” Winnie asked.

“Nothing. Something for school.” He immediately closed the browser on his phone and set it face down on the table.

“You know, I used to work with the homeless, for my job, before you were born.” She expected him to ignore her, or—cue her personal least favorite—roll his eyes, but instead, he looked at her with interest.

“In what capacity?”

Capacity! Winnie almost snickered, but she knew how much that would offend Samuel. When she was his age, she certainly wasn’t saying words like capacity. Besides, she was used to his large vocabulary. She kept her face neutral.

“Well, I was a case manager for people with mental health issues. Some of my cases were…well…homeless.”

“Really? How old were they?”

Now that she had his attention, she didn’t plan on losing it. She shrugged as nonchalantly as possible. “All different ages, some as young as you, all the way up to people Granny’s age.”

“Why were they homeless?”

Winnie searched her mind for a good answer, one that would interest him.

“I had one guy, his name was Adam. He came up to Seattle when he was twenty-four, right after getting out of jail. He beat a guy up, that’s why he was in jail,” Winnie said, seeing the question on Samuel’s face. “He’d gone to school to be an engineer—before the fight and the jail time. But by the time he got out, his mom had disowned him, and he had no other family in the area.”

“So, nowhere to go,” Samuel concluded.

“That’s right. He came to Seattle because he heard he could get work up here, but the job didn’t pan out, and so he was homeless.” There was a long pause during which Winnie thought he was done discussing the topic, but then he propped his birdlike elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hand. “Did he have a mental illness?”

“That’s none of your business,” Winnie said firmly. She could tell that switching to the mom role had cost her Samuel, because he looked away. She felt immediate regret. Should she have told him that Adam was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that on his twenty-sixth birthday he’d gone missing? The police hadn’t bothered to look for a homeless man, though they’d written up the report for Winnie and then told her to have a nice day.