On Main Street he stops in front of the Leabrook Homestyle Diner and there is a sign in the window reading SHORT-ORDER COOK WANTED. Don Callahan short-ordered through most of his time at seminary and did more than his share of the same at Home on the East Side of Manhattan. He thinks he might fit right in here at the Leabrook Homestyle. Turns out he’s right, although it takes three shifts before the ability to crack a pair of eggs one-handed onto the grill comes swimming back to him. The owner, a long drink of water named Dicky Rudebacher, asks Callahan if he has any medical problems— “catching stuff,” he calls it— and nods simple acceptance when Callahan says he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask Callahan for any paperwork, not so much as a Social Security number. He wants to pay his new short-order off the books, if that’s not a problem. Callahan assures him it is not.

“One more thing,” says Dicky Rudebacher, and Callahan waits for the shoe to drop. Nothing would surprise him, but all Rudebacher says is: “You look like a drinking man.”

Callahan allows as how he has been known to take a drink.

“So have I,” Rudebacher says. “In this business it’s the way you protect your gahdam sanity. I ain’t gonna smell your breath when you come in…if you come in on time. Miss coming in on time twice, though, and you’re on your way to wherever. I ain’t going to tell you that again.”

Callahan short-orders at the Leabrook Homestyle Diner for three weeks, and stays two blocks down at the Sunset Motel. Only it’s not always the Homestyle, and it’s not always the Sunset. On his fourth day in town, he wakes up in the Sunrise Motel, and the Leabrook Homestyle Diner is the Fort Lee Homestyle Diner. The Leabrook Register which people have been leaving behind on the counter becomes the Fort Lee Register-American . He is not exactly relieved to discover Gerald Ford has reassumed the Presidency.

When Rudebacher pays him at the end of his first week— in Fort Lee— Grant is on the fifties, Jackson is on the twenties, and Alexander Hamilton is on the single ten in the envelope the boss hands him. At the end of the second week— in Leabrook— Abraham Lincoln is on the fifties and someone named Chadbourne is on the ten. It’s still Andrew Jackson on the twenties, which is something of a relief. In Callahan’s motel room, the bedcover is pink in Leabrook and orange in Fort Lee. This is handy. He always knows which version of New Jersey he’s in as soon as he wakes up.