Kessler puffed himself up and announced that he was the manager, and that the diner did not allow unattended children to occupy booths. The soldier, Sergeant Daniel Cruz, calmly told him that his wife had died eight months earlier, and that Josie lived with her aunt. Her aunt knew every Sunday where she went. She gave Josie the bus fare and the quarters herself, because she could not bear to tell a child to stop hoping.

Sergeant Cruz then said, in a voice that carried across the whole diner, that he had spent eleven months overseas dreaming of one plate of pancakes at the Sunrise Diner, with the only person he had left. He said that any man who would throw a lonely child out of that booth did not deserve to run a place named after the morning. Kessler stood very still. A trucker in the back row began to clap, and then the whole room joined him.

I fired up the grill and made the biggest stack of pancakes the Sunrise Diner has ever served. Lorraine brought butter and syrup, and Josie finally ate with syrup, laughing with her mouth full. Sergeant Cruz held his daughter on his lap and told me quietly that he had been afraid to find an empty booth. I told him the booth had never been empty. Then I noticed Kessler standing beside me, holding a folded dish towel and looking at the floor.

Kessler apologized in front of the whole diner, and I accepted. He announced that every Sunday, the corner booth by the window would be reserved for any child who needed a place to wait, and the pancakes would be free. He kept his word. Sergeant Cruz was discharged that summer and took a job at the fire station down the road. Every Sunday at nine, Josie and her father sit in the corner booth, and I bring them syrup.