The Counter

They walked into town because there was nothing to eat but eggs.

There were nine eggs left, and the ham, and a heel of bread, and Theo stood in front of the open refrigerator at half past seven on Sunday morning in his shorts with the cold coming out round his bare legs, and looked at the eggs, and looked at the list on the door above them, and said, with the air of a man reading a prophecy:

“Number five.”

“Eat at a counter,” said Marcus, from the table, at once.

“And pay,” said Felix.

“There’s a café. On the highway. We passed it.” Theo shut the refrigerator. “Mrs Sixkiller said the store in town or Vinita. A café’s in town.”

“It’s two miles,” said Frederick.

“Then we walk,” said Theo. “People walk. Ordinary people walk two miles to breakfast on a Sunday. It’s practically the definition.”

Nobody in Oklahoma walked two miles to breakfast on a Sunday in July. Frederick found that out at a quarter to eight, on the gravel road at the bottom of the farmhouse drive, when the sun was already on the back of his neck like a hand; and he found it out again on the paved road at the end of the gravel, where a pickup came past them going into town and slowed, and the man driving it looked at the four of them walking along the verge in the heat with an expression of the deepest concern, and leaned out of the window and said you boys broke down?, and Theo said no sir, we’re walking, and the man looked at them for a long time and said well, God bless you, and drove on.

A hundred yards behind them, on the other side of the road, Kimura was walking too.

She had come out of the trailer as they came down the steps, in a cap and sunglasses and a T-shirt with a fish on it, carrying a pair of binoculars, and when Frederick looked at her she had raised the binoculars and looked through them very carefully at the oak. Birds, she had said, to nobody. There are a lot of birds here. And now she was walking a hundred yards behind them on the other side of the road, stopping every so often to look through the binoculars at a fence post, or a telegraph wire, or the sky, with enormous interest.

Behind her, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile, the grey car with the tinted windows was coming along the road at the speed of a walking man, with Castellanos in it, and the air conditioning on.

“That’s not ordinary,” said Felix, looking back.

“It’s a start,” said Frederick.

---

The café was on the highway at the edge of town, where the road came round a bend above the cove, a low building with a flat roof and a gravel lot in front of it full of pickups, and a sign on a pole, a tall old sign with a coffee cup on it and an arrow made of light bulbs, half of them gone, pointing at the door. The sign said COVE CAFÉ, with the accent, and under it, on a board hung from two chains, BREAKFAST ALL DAY - PIE.

They stood in the lot and looked at it.

“Is that ordinary?” said Marcus.

“That,” said Theo, with reverence, “is the most ordinary thing I have ever seen in my life.”

Frederick pushed the door. A bell on a spring over it rang, and the cold came out to meet them, air conditioning, real, beautiful; and the smell, coffee and bacon and something frying and something sweet; and the noise, a room full of people talking at once, which stopped.

It did not stop all at once. It stopped the way a field of grass stops moving when the wind drops, from the near side to the far side, table by table, in a wave. Two old men at the table by the door. A family of five in church clothes in the booth by the window. A man in a cap reading a newspaper at the counter. A woman with a baby. Three young men in work shirts with their elbows on a table and their caps pushed back. A teenage girl with a coffee pot. And behind the counter, at the end, by the till, a woman of fifty or so, broad, with her hair up in a clip and a pencil behind her ear and an apron with a fish on it, the same fish as Kimura’s T-shirt, who was in the middle of putting a plate of pancakes down in front of the man with the newspaper, and stopped with the plate an inch above the counter.

She looked at Frederick.

Four seconds. He counted them, the way you count between the lightning and the thunder, without meaning to, and it was four. Four seconds in which the woman at the end of the counter with the plate in her hand looked at him, in the door of the Cove Café at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning in his shorts and an old T-shirt and trainers, with the dust of the road on his legs; and he watched her face do the whole thing, from start to finish, the way you can watch a wave go along a beach: see him, and know him, and be astonished, and then think about it, and then decide.

She put the plate down.

“Sit anywhere, hons,” she said. “Counter’s got four together on the end. Coffee?”

---

The counter had nine stools.

They were the old kind, chrome, on a single pole each, with round red seats that went round if you pushed them, and the four on the end were empty, and they sat on them in a row: Frederick, Theo, Felix, Marcus. Marcus sat on his very carefully, as if it were a seat in church, and put both hands flat on the counter in front of him, which was pale green with a pattern of little gold stars in it, worn white in front of every stool where a thousand elbows had been.

The woman came down the counter with the coffee pot and four cups and put the cups down in front of them, upside down on their saucers, and turned them over one after another with a flick, and filled them, without asking whether anybody wanted it.

“Darlene,” she said. She tapped the name on the badge on her apron with the spout of the pot. “Menu’s on the board. Pie’s in the case. Don’t have the special, it’s liver.” She looked at the four of them along the counter, one after another, the way Mrs Sixkiller had, the way Mr Abernathy did. Her eyes stopped on Frederick for exactly the same length of time as on the others. “You’re the boys at Loretta’s place.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“She said you’d be in. She said one of you could cook an egg.” Darlene looked at Theo. “That you?”

“How did you know?”

“You’ve got the look,” said Darlene. “What’ll it be?”

---

Behind them the café had started again.

Not all at once, either. It started the way it had stopped, in a wave, from the far side to the near, table by table, quietly at first and then louder. But it had not started the same. Frederick could hear it, sitting on his stool with his back to it and his hands round the coffee cup. It was the sound of thirty people talking about something else on purpose.

The family in the booth by the window were talking about the sermon, loudly. The three young men in work shirts were talking about a boat engine, in great detail. The two old men by the door were talking about rain, which there had not been for a month. And the man with the newspaper at the counter, three stools down, who had a cap with a tractor on it and a face like a walnut, had his newspaper open in front of him on the counter beside his pancakes; and Frederick, looking sideways along the counter, could see the front page of it, and on the front page, below the fold, there was a photograph, quite small, of the Blue Drawing Room on Thursday night, with the flags, and three hundred people, and in the middle of them, in a dark suit, looking at something out of the frame, himself.

The man with the cap saw him see it.

He did not say anything. He looked at the photograph for a moment, and then at his pancakes, and then, very slowly and carefully, as though he were folding a flag, he folded the newspaper in half, and in half again, so that the photograph was on the inside, and put it down on the counter beside his plate, face down, and put the salt cellar on it.

Then he picked up his fork and went on eating his pancakes.

In the booth by the window, a girl of about five in a church dress, with a ribbon in her hair, stood up on the seat and pointed over the back of it, straight at the end of the counter, and said, in a voice that went through the whole café like a bell:

“Mama, that’s the King.”

The whole café went on talking about something else.

“No it isn’t, baby,” said her mother, without looking round. “Sit down and eat your pancake.”

“It is. It’s the King. From the television. Mama, it’s…”

“Sit down, Kaylynn,” said her mother, “and eat your pancake,” and the girl sat down, and ate her pancake, staring over the back of the booth with enormous eyes the whole time; and at the counter Frederick looked very hard at the menu board on the wall, at BISCUITS AND GRAVY and CHICKEN FRIED STEAK and LIVER SPECIAL (SUNDAYS), and felt Theo beside him shaking, very slightly, all down his left side.

“Don’t,” said Frederick, out of the side of his mouth.

“I’m not.”

“You are. I can feel you.”

“I’m not,” said Theo, and put his face in his coffee cup.

---

He had biscuits and gravy, because he had never had it and Marcus said that if you were going to eat at a counter you had to have the thing you’d never had, that was the rule, his uncle in Oakland said so. It came on a thick white plate, two enormous soft biscuits split open and drowned in a pale grey gravy with pieces of sausage in it, and it looked like nothing he had ever been served in his life, and he ate all of it, and then wiped the plate with the last piece of biscuit, which he had been told since he was four never to do, and Darlene, passing with the coffee pot, looked at the plate and said good boy and filled his cup.

Theo had pancakes. Felix had eggs, because he said he wanted to see somebody else do them. Marcus had the chicken fried steak at eight in the morning and did not regret it.

They sat on the stools and ate, and turned round on them, a little, now and then, because the stools went round, and drank the coffee, which was terrible and which Darlene kept filling, and out of the window behind the counter the cove went down blue in the morning sun to the docks and the boats, and the air conditioning blew cold on the back of Frederick’s neck; and nobody looked at them. Thirty people, and not one of them looked. Not the family in the booth, except Kaylynn. Not the three young men with the boat engine. Not the old men by the door. Not the man with the tractor cap, three stools down, who finished his pancakes and drank his coffee and read the inside pages of his newspaper, carefully, one at a time, without unfolding it, round the salt cellar.

It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him. He had been looked at all his life. He had been looked at in classrooms and churches and stadiums and on the deck of a ship and in the window of a car going down the Axis with ten thousand people on either side, and he knew how to be looked at, the way he knew how to walk. He had never in his life been in a room full of people who all knew exactly who he was and had decided, together, without saying a word to each other, not to.

He sat on his stool with the coffee going cold in front of him and did not know what to do with his hands.

---

The bill came on a slip of green paper, face down, in front of Marcus, because Marcus was at the end.

Marcus turned it over and looked at it and went pink.

“Twenty-three forty,” he said. “For all of us.”

Felix took out a wallet, a real one, brown, with a zip on the side, and counted out his part in coins, carefully, onto the counter, the way you counted change into somebody’s hand. Marcus took out a fold of notes from his shirt pocket that his mother had given him at the airport in an envelope with FOR EMERGENCIES AND PIE written on it, and took out one note, and looked at it, and put it down.

Theo did not take out anything.

Frederick looked at him.

“I’ve got the eleven pounds,” said Theo, after a moment.

He did. Frederick knew he did. It was in his bag at the farmhouse, in the envelope it had come in, the long white envelope from the Household with the crest on the flap, with the letter in it from the Keeper of the Privy Purse acknowledging a loss sustained in the course of the Crown’s business; eleven pounds, in two notes and a coin, which Theo had been carrying about with him in that envelope since the beginning of June, everywhere, and had not spent.

“I know you have,” said Frederick.

“I’m not spending it.”

“I know you’re not.”

“It’s not for spending.” Theo looked at the counter. “It’s for having.”

“I know.”

They looked at each other. Then they both looked at the slip of green paper in front of Marcus with 23.40 on it in pencil.

“I’ll get yours,” said Felix, to Theo.

“Thanks.”

And then the three of them, Theo and Felix and Marcus, looked at Frederick.

He knew before he put his hands in his pockets. He put them in anyway. Both of them, front and back. The handkerchief. The Private Secretary’s list of telephone numbers, folded small, to be kept on his person at all times. Nothing else.

“Number five,” said Felix, gently. “And pay.”

“I know.”

“You can’t do number five if you don’t pay.”

“I know.”

There was a movement by the door. He looked round. Kimura had come in, at some point, without the bell ringing, which should not have been possible, and was sitting in a booth on her own with a glass of iced tea and the binoculars on the table in front of her, and she was looking at him across the café with her eyebrows very slightly raised and her hand on her own back pocket, where her wallet was.

He shook his head at her. Very slightly.

She took her hand off her pocket and picked up her iced tea and looked out of the window at the birds.

---

Darlene came down the counter with the coffee pot and stopped in front of him and looked at the slip, and at the coins and the note on the counter in front of the others, and at the empty space on the counter in front of him; and then at his face.

She did not say anything for a moment.

Then she put the coffee pot down, and turned round, and reached up to the wall behind the till, where there was a board hanging on a nail, a small blackboard, the kind you write the specials on, except that it had no specials on it. It had names. A column of them, in chalk, in different hands, some faded nearly to nothing and some new, and beside each name a figure. BEAVERS 4.50. ROWE 12.10. THE PASTOR 3.00. DUANE (BOAT) 31.75. And she took the pencil from behind her ear, and put it back, and took a piece of chalk out of her apron pocket instead, and wrote at the bottom of the column, in large clear capitals, under DUANE (BOAT):

HANOVER 6.85

She put the chalk back in her pocket and picked up the coffee pot.

“You can owe me,” she said. “Everybody owes me.” She looked at him over the pot. “You pay when you’ve got it, hon. Not before. And not one of these,” she jerked her head at the room behind them, at all of it, the booths and the tables and the man with the folded newspaper, without looking at any of it, “pays it for you. You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.” She filled his cup. “Half of number five, then.”

He stared at her.

Darlene looked back at him with a perfectly straight face, and then looked, very briefly, past him, at Theo, who had gone a deep red and was looking at the ceiling; and Frederick understood that Theo had, at some point in the last half hour, while he was eating his biscuits and gravy, told Darlene about the list.

“You told her,” he said.

“She asked what we were doing in Ketchum,” said Theo, to the ceiling. “She asked very nicely.”

At the end of the counter, three stools down, the man with the tractor cap had stopped reading. He was looking at the four of them along the counter with a pair of very pale blue eyes in his walnut face, and he had been listening, Frederick realised, the whole time.

“Number eight,” said the man. “What’s number eight?”

There was a silence.

“Catch a fish,” said Felix.

The man looked at Felix for a long moment. Then at the others. Then at Frederick, and his eyes stayed on Frederick’s face for exactly as long as they had on the others’, and no longer.

“Huh,” he said. He got down off his stool, and picked up his folded newspaper, and put his cap straight, and went to the till, and put a note down in front of Darlene and did not wait for the change. At the door he stopped, with his hand on it, and the bell above it waiting.

“Cecil Rowe,” he said. “I’m on the cove. The green house with the boats. You boys want to catch a fish,” he looked at them, “a real one, not a stocked one, not on a line off a dock like a tourist, you come and see me.” He pushed the door. The bell rang. “Not with your hands, though. You’re not ready for your hands.”

He went out into the heat.

“What does that mean?” said Marcus.

Darlene, behind the counter, filling the cup of the man who had come in to take Cecil Rowe’s stool, said without turning round:

“It means he likes you, hon. God help you.”

---

His mother rang at nine that evening, which was four in the morning at Solliden, because she had set an alarm.

He took the call on the porch, sitting on the top step in the dark with the whip-poor-will going in the oak and the insects breathing in the trees, on the telephone the Household had given him for Sundays, which did nothing else. She was in bed. He could tell. Her voice was low and warm and slightly thick, the way it was on Christmas mornings.

“Well?” she said, in Swedish.

“I owe a woman called Darlene six pounds eighty-five.”

There was a silence on the line from Öland.

“For what?”

“Biscuits and gravy. And coffee. Three cups. She kept filling it.”

“You owe money.”

“It’s on a slate. On the wall. Under a man called Duane who owes thirty-one seventy-five for a boat.” He looked out at the dark yard. “Thirty people in the café knew who I was, and none of them looked at me. Not once. A man folded up his newspaper so the picture of me was on the inside and put the salt on it.”

His mother did not say anything for a long time.

“Fredde,” she said at last, and her voice had changed; it had the smile in it, the one that changed the shape of her Swedish. “That is the most wonderful thing you have ever told me.”

“It was strange.”

“Yes. It is very strange. It has happened to me once.” A pause. “In Gothenburg, in 2011, at a fish stall. I have never forgotten it.” Another pause. “Pay her back.”

“I will.”

“Not with my money.”

“Not with anybody’s money,” he said. “With mine. When I’ve got some.”

“And how will you get some?”

He looked over his shoulder, through the screen door, into the dark kitchen, at the refrigerator, at the white shape of the back of page fourteen held up by the magnet shaped like the State.

“Number four,” he said.

His mother laughed, at four in the morning, on Öland, in bed, in the dark; and he heard her put the telephone down on the blanket, the way she did when she was laughing too much to hold it, and heard her laugh go on, small and far away and real, across five thousand miles and the Baltic, for a long time.