Just inside the front door was a hand-painted sign featuring a rooster crowing, “Sit Anywhere Ya Like!” Kris and Sadie chose a table in the front window. Red-and-white striped cloth curtains flanked the panes, pulled back with thick gold rope. Kris quickly scanned a one-page laminated menu whose most extravagant offerings were a Denver omelet and a three-egg hash brown scramble.
“How hungry are you?” she asked.
There was no answer.
She glanced over the top of the menu. Sadie was staring out the window at a scraggly greenfinch perched atop a blue mailbox. Clumps of its grayish-brown feathers had fallen out in several places, leaving patches of bare, prickled skin. It stood on one leg, its other leg missing. Kris noticed several raw, blistering sores at the base of the finch’s beak. Most likely trichomoniasis. She had treated several cases over the years at her clinic in Black Ridge. The worst had been when Dorothy Atwood took in an injured pigeon and chose to allow the poor creature to share a cage with her darling cockatiel and a blue budgie. By the time Dorothy brought them in, all three birds were infected with the parasite. The pigeon was dead in a day. The cockatiel and budgie flew off into the great beyond two days later. Kris assumed this greenfinch wouldn’t make it to see the weekend.
“Sadie,” she said, trying to draw her daughter’s attention away from the window. “You want eggs? Or pancakes?”
“Eggs, I guess.”
“And bacon?”
Sadie shrugged, never taking her eyes off the mangy bird.
There was the sound of rubber soles shuffling along the tile floor, and one of the waitresses, an alarmingly thin woman in her seventies, sidled up to their table. Her brittle hair was a dull gray and long—so long that Kris feared it could snap at any moment like a bundle of dry twigs. Canyons of wrinkles lined her sun-damaged face. On the breast of her light green blouse was a plastic nametag in the shape of a saucer. Printed in bold black letters was her name: Doris.
“Mornin’,” Doris said, her lips, shellacked with layer upon layer of thick red lipstick, stretching into a tight smile.
Kris did her best to return the smile. “Good morning.”
Doris held up a small spiral notepad, the tip of her ballpoint pen hovering in anticipation. “What can I get ’cha?”
Kris motioned toward Sadie. “She’ll have eggs, scrambled, with a side of bacon. And can you melt a little cheddar cheese on the eggs please?”
“Cheddar cheese, yep, you got it.” Doris scribbled the order in chicken scratch across the lined page. “And for you?”
“A short stack of buttermilk pancakes. And coffee. Black.”
“Hash browns or country fries?”
“Um, hash browns, I guess.”
“White or wheat toast?”
“Wheat.”
“Buttered or dry?”
“Dry is fine.”
Doris frowned slightly as if she disapproved of this answer, her deep wrinkles splintering at the edges into tinier hair-thin fractures. “You wanna add a side of biscuits and gravy?”
Kris noticed there were words printed across the side of Doris’s pen, an advertisement for a cholesterol medication. The sharp ripple of a chuckle tried to fight its way up from Kris’s chest, but she caught it before it could escape her lips, and she pretended to cough. “No, I think I’m good.”
Doris jotted down the rest of the order. She began to step away, then paused. She was staring at Sadie. Her red, razor-thin smile sliced farther into her ancient cheeks. “Why, you’re pretty, just like your mama. You got the most beautiful hair, ya know that, sweetheart?”
Sadie glanced nervously to her mother. The morning sunshine fell softly across the back of the girl’s head, and the light seemed to ignite her curls.
“Thank you,” Kris answered for her. “It’s just like mine, when I was her age.”
Raising a bony hand to her face, Doris slowly ran her fingers back and forth over a cheek covered in skin as thin as tissue paper. It was an odd gesture of which she barely seemed aware. It was as if she were pretending it was someone else’s hand, attempting to soothe her.
“I bet you’re smart, too,” she said, her gaze never leaving Sadie. “Bet you do real good in school. Polite. Listen to your teachers.”
Her hand stopped, her palm under her chin, fingers cradling her face.
“Such a sweet girl. Such a sweet, sweet girl.”
For a brief moment, Doris fell silent, her thoughts pulled to a sad, faraway place. Then she cleared her throat, as if the sight of Sadie had caused a breath to lodge painfully there. “Well,” she said, her voice small and weak, “welcome to Patty’s. Food’ll be up shortly.”
“Thanks,” Kris said again, but Doris was already shuffling off toward the kitchen. She did not look back.
Kris turned to Sadie with the intention of offering an apologetic smile, something that acknowledged the awkwardness of the interaction. But suddenly a strange sensation gripped her, like a memory surfacing from beneath dark waters. There was something off about it. It was as if she were experiencing the memory from someone else’s point of view—not an out-of-body experience but what she could only think to call other body. It was the uncanny feeling she got when she stared at her own reflection in a mirror for too long. She began to feel as though her reflection were a separate entity, no longer bound to her movement. At any moment, it could grin and wink to let her know it was free.
And then she realized what had caused that odd sense of dislocation: Sadie was now Krissy, the little girl with untamed red hair, and Kris was the mother who could only gaze upon her daughter and try to recall what it felt like to be so carefree.
Except she isn’t. She knows pain, more than any child should.
“If you catch an animal, can it be your pet?” Sadie asked suddenly.
For the second time since entering Patty’s, Kris felt herself yanked, without warning, through time.
Sadie was looking out the window again. The greenfinch’s head was twisted backward, its beak digging desperately into its raggedy feathers to snap at whatever microscopic creatures were burrowing into its flesh.
“What?” Kris asked, her mind foggy, as if she had been startled out of a dream.
Sadie did not repeat her question. She set her chin down on her folded hands and stared out the window as if she had never spoken.
Out on the mailbox, the diseased finch fluttered its itchy wings.
The faintest hint of a smile played at the corners of Sadie’s lips.
It was close to noon when Kris pushed open the front door of Patty’s Plate, and she and Sadie stepped out into a far gloomier day than the one they had left less than an hour before. Large white clouds dotted the blue sky like puffs of smoke from a cartoon train, moving lackadaisically past the sun to plunge the town into momentary shadow. The air had warmed to a moderate eighty-four degrees and would probably only rise a few degrees more before evening.
At breakfast, Sadie had taken tiny, hesitant bites of the gooey orange eggs on her plate, but by the time the check had come, she had managed to eat enough to satisfy Kris. The food seemed to have done them some good, their steps lighter and their strides longer as they crossed to the Jeep parked at the curb.
“It won’t take long, I promise,” Kris said.