Dinner was no longer being served, and the vomit-green chairs contained only a few lonesome stragglers, gazing down at textbooks as they slowly forked their food. A gigantic clock glowered down from the far wall, its latticed iron hands lurching noisily to mark each passing minute. Go somewhere else, the noise seemed to say, anywhere but here.Pella passed through the open doorway to the kitchen. A small but substantial man, built low to the ground like an Indian burial mound, was scraping mashed potatoes into a giant baggie. He had wide fleshy features, flared nostrils, and acne scars under his eyes. He wore a flopped-over, caved-in chef’s hat. “Closed,” he said forlornly, without glancing up, before Pella could open her mouth. “Closed.”“I know. I’m sorry to bother you. I was hoping that maybe—”“Closed.” He pronounced it softly, as a sad but ineluctable truth, and clanged his mashed-potato scooper against the rim of the pan.“I know, it’s just…”He didn’t even say the word this time, just shook his bent head from side to side and clanged the potato scooper against the pan’s rim again, somehow producing a long somber O sound that matched his voice’s timbre: Cl-OOOOOOO-sed.“Right,”
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