“Where’s your mother?” I managed.
“She works here,” Tobias said, hooking a thumb toward the door.
“But right now she’s arguing with the manager, because we don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight and she’s trying to fix it.” He said this the way children say the hard facts of their lives, plainly, without self-pity, because it was simply the weather they lived in.
“She’s really good at fixing things.
But the manager’s being mean.”
We don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight. Four boys with my face, my eyes, my father’s dimple, my own nervous hands — and no bed.
I followed them out of that men’s room with my heart going like something coming loose.
Chapter 5 — Then I Saw Her
The boys led me back out into the restaurant, weaving between the white-clothed tables, and I came around a partition, and I saw her.
She was standing near the kitchen doors in a black server’s apron, her back straight, arguing quietly and with enormous dignity against a manager who wasn’t listening.
And time simply stopped working.
The small pale scar above her eyebrow — I had once held a bag of frozen peas to that eyebrow, the night she got it.
The particular impossible green of her eyes.
The exact set of her shoulders when she’d decided not to cry in front of someone who didn’t deserve her tears.