(Didn’t you move here from one of those square states?) Mr. Webber started pointing to his head long before he reached the Goody-Goody booth. Sam pretended not to see him. Standing behind the counter, he kept his eyes down on the round waffle iron and the spatula in his hand. “Sam, how many times do I have to tell you? Hat.” “Huh? Oh, hi, Mr. Webber. I was just making some waffle cones. I want to be ready for the Saturday-night rush. Did I show you my trick with the miniature marshmallows to solve the leak problem?” “Where is your hat?” “It’s around here somewhere. I’ll find it.” “That was an awful visual I just got, Sam. I’m crossing the food court and I see eight different eateries, and eight identical mannequins behind the counters. If I were a potential customer, I could just as easily have gone over to the Cinnabon. Or the Dairy Queen. The eye should stop at Goody-Goody. That hat’s an attention magnet.” It certainly is, Sam thought. Mr. Webber was a widower and a retiree from the phone company, where he’d worked as a supervisor for forty years, and once he’d retired, he hadn’t known what to do with himself.
