Free It's Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville Page A

waiter rushes up, wearing a white napkin over his arm like a banner, and takes our order. He returns in a moment with a shiny clean white linen tablecloth and a basket of fresh Italian bread and rolls. On a third trip he brings enough chilled butter for a family and asks if we want coffee with lunch or later. Later, we say.
    "Man, this is living!" says Ben as he moves in on the bread.
    "He treats us just like people."
    Pretty soon the waiter is back with our lasagna and spaghetti, and he swirls around the table as if he were dancing. "Anything else now? Mind the hot plates, very hot! Have a good lunch now. I bring the coffee later."
    He swirls away, the napkin over his arm making a little breeze, and circles another table. It's a small room, and there are only four tables eating, but he seems to enjoy acting like he was serving royalty at the Waldorf. When we're just finished eating, he comes back with a pot of steaming coffee and a pitcher of real cream.
    I'm dolloping the cream in, and it floats, when a thought hits me: We got to leave a tip for this waiter.
    I whisper to Ben, "Hey, how much money you got?"
    He reaches in his pocket and fishes out a buck, a dime, and a quarter. We study them. Figure coffees for a dime each, and the total check ought to be $1.95. We've got $2.35 between us. We can still squeak through with bus fare if we only leave the waiter a dime, which is pretty cheap.
    At that moment he comes back and refills our coffee cups and asks what we will have for dessert.
    "Uh, nothing, nothing at all," I say.
    "Couldn't eat another thing," says Ben.
    So the waiter brings the check and along with it a plate of homemade cookies. He says, "My wife make. On the house."
    We both thank him, and I look at Ben and he looks at me. I put down my dollar and he puts down a dollar and a quarter.
    "Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. Come again," says the waiter.
    We walk into the street, and Ben spins the lone remaining dime in the sun. I say, "Heads or tails?"
    "Huh? Heads."
    It comes up heads, so Ben keeps his own dime. He says, "We could have hung onto enough for one bus fare, but that's no use."
    "No use at all. 'Specially if it was yours."
    "Are we still heading for Fulton Street?"
    "Sure. We got to get fish for Cat."
    "It better be for free."
    We walk, threading across Manhattan and downtown. I guess it's thirty or forty blocks, but after a good lunch it doesn't seem too far.
    You can smell the fish market when you're still quite a ways off. It runs for a half a dozen blocks alongside the East River, with long rows of sheds divided into stores for the different wholesalers. Around on the side streets there are bars and fish restaurants. It's too bad we don't have Cat with us because he'd love sniffing at all the fish heads and guts and stuff on the street. Fish market business is done mostly in the morning, I guess, and now men are hosing down the streets and sweeping fish garbage up into piles. I get a guy to give me a bag and select a couple of the choicer – and cleaner – looking bits. I get a nice red snapper head and a small whole fish, looks like a mackerel. Ben acts as if fish guts make him sick, and as soon as I've got a couple he starts saying "Come on, come on, let's go."
    I realize when we're leaving that I don't even notice the fish smell anymore. You just get used to it. We walk uptown, quite a hike, along East Broadway and across Grand and Delancey. There's all kinds of intriguing smells wafting around here: hot breads and pickles and fish cooking. This is a real Jewish neighborhood, and you can sure tell it's a holiday from the smell of all the dinners cooking. And lots of people are out in their best clothes gabbing together. Some of the men wear black skullcaps, and some of them have big black felt hats and long white beards. We go past a crowd gathering outside a movie house.
    "They're not going to the movies," Ben says. "On holidays sometimes they rent a movie theater for services. It must be