Featured Passage, Light in August

In this scene, Joe Christmas, an 18 year-old, has returned to a restaurant to see again a waitress he saw once before.  Enjoy!

He believed that he could not leave now; that if he tried to go out, the blonde woman would stop him.  He believed that the men at the back knew this and were laughing at him.  So he sat quite still on the stool, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm.  He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight.  He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen.  "Coffee and pie," he said.

Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty.  "Lemon cocoanut chocolate."

In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all.  "Yes," Joe said.

The hands did not move.  The voice did not move. "Lemon cocoanut chocolate.  Which kind."  To the others they must have looked quite strange.  Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying: the youth countryfaced, in clean and spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh.