The heavyset woman regarding them patiently was in her midforties. Her bleached blond hair was piled in swirls atop her head, a sweeping abstract sculpture. She wore a plain white waitress’s uniform. Two pens peeped from the lip of a blouse pocket. One hand held a third, the other a yellow note pad. Gum snapped as she chewed. Her cheeks were pale rose.
"What is this place?" Wendy spoke first. "No — where is this place?"
Chiclet popped, punctuating each sentence. "This place? Why, this here’s the Conjunction. Me and Max, we run the whole joint." She nodded proudly toward the kitchen, from which strange and wondrous odors emanated, not to mention the thick aroma of hot grease. "We’ve been here for some time. I take it this is the first time out this way for you folks?" She scanned them approvingly. "Always nice to see new faces. We got enough regulars as it is." She hefted pad and pencil, 160 pounds of kitchen computer instantly on-line. "I expect you’d like something to eat."
Frank didn’t reply. His attention was drawn to a booth on the other side of the restaurant. Its occupants could only be the drivers of the two extraordinary machines parked outside.
A giant green caterpillar wearing wraparound blue sunshades sat across the table from a tall, thin creature built of petrified Silly Putty. Taking up an enormous chair out in the aisle was a walrus-sized quadruped with engraved tusks and hands like a pianist’s. He wore dark gray dungarees and waved his hands animatedly as he spoke. Most of his sentences were directed to the caterpillar. The Silly Putty person sat and sipped silently from a glass two feet tall and an inch in diameter.
"Sorry?" Frank blinked, leaned back in his chair.
"Asked what I could git ya." The waitress started to slide her pencil behind one ear. "I can see you folks are tired. I’ll come back in a few minutes."
"No, no, that’s all right," Alicia said quickly. "Could I — do you have coffee?"
"Don’t see why not. What else we sellin' today?"
"I wanna chocolate shake," Steven told her, "with whipped cream on top!"
His mother bent close to him. "Steven, we don’t know if a place like this carries anything like — "
"One chocolate shake." The waitress made a terse notation on her pad, looked up. "You folks gonna have anything to eat, or you just thirsty?"
A numbed Frank picked up one of the menus, opened the laminated sheets. It was as thick as a small book and full of writing that leaped off the page. He couldn’t read a word of it. Unlike the sign above the entrance, the words did not change as he studied them.
The waitress leaned over his shoulder. She smelled of cheap perfume. He wondered if it was produced by adding liquid to her skin, or if it was her actual body odor, or if it changed like the sign outside to meet the olfactory requirements of an extraordinarily diverse clientele.
"I forgot: you folks are new here." She straightened. "Max is pretty versatile. You just tell me what you’d like and I’ll bet a dime against a dollar he can whip it up."
"Anything?" Frank swallowed, the saliva running inside his mouth like a spring flood.
"Sure. He likes a change now and then. Gets tired of feeding the same specials to the same regulars."
"Okay." One more swallow. "I’d like — a New York strip sirloin, medium well, with grilled onions, baked potato, sour cream and butter on the side, no chives, and whatever the vegetable of the day is." When he finished he was nearly in tears. "Can he — can he do that?"
She grinned down at him, suddenly no longer an inexplicable vision. "What size steak?"
"Twelve — no, ten ounces. I don’t want to overdo it."
Everyone ordered. Fried chicken for Steven, shrimp salad for Wendy and her mother. Mouse requested unfamiliar food in an unrecognizable language while Flucca called for chicken mole with frijoles and rice. Burnfingers Begay waited until everyone else had put in their order before calmly requesting tenderloin of venison filled with trout pate beneath a sour cream-champagne sauce, potatoes au gratin on the side, and haricots verts accompanied by a 1948 Bavarian Liebfraumilch. Not to mention rambutan sorbet for dessert.
"Right." Their waitress scanned the long list before walking back to the kitchen. They could hear her rattling off the orders to an unseen figure behind the grill.
Wendy was shaking her head. "Can you believe this place?"
"It’s no more impossible than everything else that’s happened to us." Her mother was arranging a napkin on her lap. "I don’t see why we shouldn’t believe in it as well."
"Got a good location," Burnfingers observed.
In a few minutes the waitress returned with their drinks: coffee, iced tea, wine, and one towering chocolate milkshake. While they drank, the walrus and his companions rose to leave. Everyone watched them go.
Frank heard their machines start up, peered out the window to observe the departure. The wheeled globe belonged to the Silly Putty creature. Instead of rolling down the road, it rose six feet off the gravel and banked sharply to its left. The wheel was rotating so rapidly around the globe it was less than a blur. The caterpillar and the walrus left in the other vehicle, exploding up the roadway opposite the cafe.
The Sonderbergs were alone in the cafe with their friends.
Twenty minutes later their food emerged from the kitchen. Wendy’s and Alicia’s salads were ice chilled, the shrimp the size of small lobsters, and everything expertly washed and shelled. Frank’s sirloin arrived on a sizzling steel platter. The first bite was purely sensuous. He chewed and swallowed two more before he could find his voice.
"Anybody — anybody else use the road we came in on?"
Their waitress frowned as she stacked serving plates. "Now that you mention it, not for quite a while. Guess that section of road’s under repair. Usually seems to be." Her gum popped, sounding like a small-caliber pistol.
"Does this place have a name?" Flucca’s lips were dark with mole sauce.
"Just the Conjunction." She hesitated, gazing toward the kitchen. "Say, it’s kinda between mealtimes right now. Would you folks mind chatting with Max while you eat? Talking to the customers is one of his biggest pleasures."
Frank’s defenses went up instinctively, relaxed when he saw Steven smiling back at him. "I guess so. Come to think of it, I’d like to meet somebody who can conjure up a meal like this in twenty minutes."
"Great!" She turned and bellowed toward the kitchen. "It’s okay, Maxie! C’mon out and shoot the bull if you want to!"
"Minute!" came the reply from the vicinity of the kitchen. "Just scrapin' the grill!"
They were three-quarters finished with their food and beginning to slow down when the chef finally emerged to join them. His waitress wife was in back of the counter setting places and arranging alien desserts inside a tall glass cylinder.
Max was almost as tall as Burnfingers Begay, and much beefier. He had a permanent five-o’clock shadow and thinning black hair. His wide apron somehow stayed in position without the aid of shoulder straps. As he approached the table he was wiping both huge hands with a dirty towel. On his bare right shoulder Frank identified a tattoo of a naked woman entwined with a snake, beneath which rode a banner and two hearts. Beneath it, in florid script, was the word MOTHER. The other shoulder displayed a tattoo, which traveled from elbow to neck. It resembled nothing on Earth.
"Everything okay, folks?" Each word ended in a grunt, giving Max the sound of an educated hog. He smiled as he listened to a barrage of compliments. "Thanks. Eileen says you folks haven’t been through this way before."
"We’re trying to fix something that’s broke," Steven blurted before anyone could stop him.
Max just nodded. "Trouble with the threads of reality?"