In Plain Sight

“What I know,” Leslie replied, her voice going hard as well, “is that you spend a lot of time and resources helping the Father when you should be making money.”

“Give it a rest, Leslie,” Alex said. “I owe the Father plenty. Call him and tell him I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

Leslie promised that she would and Alex hung up.

Father Harrison Clementine ran the Brotherhood of Hope Mission out of an old ramshackle church smack in the middle of the west side’s outer-ring. In former days it had been a dance hall. Now it was a large open building with a three-story dormitory attached. Alex had spent five years living in that dormitory, between the ages of twelve and seventeen. His father had been a professional runewright, scribbling away minor restoration runes, like the ones Alex had just given to Mary, for a nickel apiece. The Lore Book that he inherited had some good runes in them, but Alex’s dad just didn’t have the talent to write them. He believed that if he only worked harder and longer than all the other runewrights, scribbling away for nickels, that somehow he wouldn’t be dirt poor. The only thing he got from all that scribbling in their cold apartment was pneumonia and an early grave. Alex’s mother had split the moment it became clear dad was never going to amount to anything, so that left Alex a twelve-year-old orphan.

Some suit from city hall wanted to put Alex in one of the city’s orphanages, but those places were hellholes. Kids as young as toddlers were crammed in with kids all the way up to seventeen, and they all were run by sadists who were in it for their government check. Alex saw enough of that right after his father’s death not to want any more. That was where Father Harry came in. Harrison Clementine had been their pastor for years and when Alex’s father died, he demanded that Alex be placed in his care at the mission. When the state said that only a licensed orphanage could apply to take Alex, Father Harry got the license. In the end, Father Harry put a roof over Alex’s head and food in his belly until Alex was old enough to do it himself. The Father also encouraged Alex to study his dad’s Lore Book and learn to write runes. If it wasn’t for the Father, Alex had no idea where he would have ended up, but it probably wouldn’t have been anywhere good.

He owed the Father more than he could ever repay, so if Father Harry needed new runes to keep the mission roof from leaking, Alex was happy to do it. Leslie didn’t understand, she couldn’t understand, and he didn’t blame her for that. She was right, helping the Father and his Mission was a drain on the business, but Alex simply didn’t care. Family was family, and Father Harry was family.

“Gonna have to take a rain check,” he said to Mary as he made his way back to the lunch counter.

“You sure?” she asked, her lips in an adorable pout. “It’ll only be another minute and a half.” As if to punctuate her words, the toast popped up from the toaster. The aroma of perfectly browned bread made his stomach growl.

He hesitated. Every minute he sat here was another minute water was pouring into the Mission’s great hall. On the other hand, it would take him at least thirty minutes to get there on the crawler and anything already wet wasn’t going to get any wetter if he took five minutes to eat.

“All right,” he said, sitting down. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Mary was such agreeable company.

Almost exactly a minute and a half later, she presented him with a plate of perfectly poached eggs on generously buttered toast.

“What did you call these?” he asked through a mouthful.

“That’s Adam and Eve on a raft with axle grease,” she said with a giggle.

Alex had heard this before, of course; waitresses and cooks in diners were always yelling such unintelligible nonsense around.

“You worked in a diner?”

“I love to cook, so I moved to the big city to try my hand here,” she said. Her voice had a lilting, far-away quality to it as she spoke. “Then, when I got here, I found out that being a cook anywhere is a serious boy’s club. The only jobs a woman can get cooking is places like this where you have to look good. No one ever wonders what the cook looks like in a diner, or a five-star restaurant for that matter.”

“Well, these eggs are perfect,” Alex said. He liked them soft, with the yokes hot but runny and the whites cooked hard, something an inexplicable number of cooks couldn’t seem to master.

“Thank you, Alex,” she said, beaming. When she smiled like that, Mary was really quite attractive.

Alex wolfed down his food and gave Mary a dime tip.

“Are you really a good cook?” he asked. She raised an eyebrow and leaned across the counter at him.

“Come back sometime,” she said. “Try me.”

Alex pulled out his pocket notepad and scribbled an address on it.