Free The Best of Nancy Kress by Nancy Kress Page B

Charlie manhandling me and about Kathy rushing into the kitchen to get Charlie. She’s a flake and always has been.
    Charlie is scowling and nodding. The harder he scowls, the nicer the government guy’s voice gets. Pretty soon the government guy is smiling sweet as pie. Charlie slinks back into the kitchen, and the four men move toward the door with John in the middle of them like some high school football huddle. Next to the real men he looks stranger than he did before, and I see how really flat his face is. But then when the huddle’s right opposite my table with the catsup bottles, John breaks away and comes over to me.
    “I am sorry, Sally Gourley,” he says. And then, “I seldom have the chance to show our friendliness to an ordinary Earth person. I make so little difference!”
    Well, that throws me. His voice sounds so sad, and besides I never thought of myself as an ordinary Earth person. Who would? So I just shrug and wipe off a catsup bottle with my towel. But then John does a weird thing. He just touches my arm where Charlie squeezed it, just touches it with the palm of one of those hands. And the palm’s not slimy at all—dry, and sort of cool, and I don’t jump or anything. Instead I remember that beautiful noise when he said his other name. Then he goes out with three of the men and the door bangs behind them on a gust of rain because Charlie never fixed the air-stop from when some kids horsing around broke it last spring.
    The fourth man stays and questions me: what did the alien say, what did I say. I tell him, but then he starts asking the exact same questions all over again, like he didn’t believe me the first time, and that gets me mad. Also he has this snotty voice, and I see how his eyebrows move when I slip once and say, “He don’t.” I might not know what John’s muscles mean but I sure as hell can read those eyebrows. So I get miffed and pretty soon he leaves and the door bangs behind him.
    I finish the catsup and mustard bottles and Kathy finishes the coffee machine. The radio in the ceiling plays something instrumental, no words, real sad. Kathy and me start to wash down the booths with disinfectant, and because we’re doing the same work together and nobody comes in, I finally say to her, “It’s funny.”
    She says, “What’s funny?”
    “Charlie called that guy ‘him’ right off. ‘I don’t got to serve him,’ he said. And I thought of him as ‘it’ at first, leastways until I had a name to use. But Charlie’s the one who threw him out.”
    Kathy swipes at the back of her booth. “And Charlie’s right. That thing scared me half to death, coming in here like that. And where there’s food being served, too.” She snorts and sprays on more disinfectant.
    Well, she’s a flake. Always has been.
    “The National Enquirer ,” Kathy goes on, “told how they have all this firepower up in the big ship that hasn’t landed yet. My husband says they could blow us all to smithereens, they’re so powerful. I don’t know why they even came here. We don’t want them. I don’t even know why they came, all that way.”
    “They want to make a difference,” I say, but Kathy barrels on ahead, not listening.
    “The Pentagon will hold them off, it doesn’t matter how much firepower they got up there or how much they insist on seeing about our defenses, the Pentagon won’t let them get any toeholds on Earth. That’s what my husband says. Blue bastards.”
    I say, “Will you please shut up?”
    She gives me a dirty look and flounces off. I don’t care. None of it is anything to me. Only, standing there with the disinfectant in my hand, looking at the dark windows and listening to the music wordless and slow on the radio, I remember that touch on my arm. And I think, they didn’t come here with any firepower to blow us all to smithereens. I just don’t believe it. So why did they come? Why come all that way from another star to walk into Charlie’s diner and order a