"Might I inquire if you two ladies are from around here?" Danny asked those bad old broads.
"Sweet Jesus, May," Dot said to her friend. "Don't that voice kinda take you back?"
"Way back," May said, looking hard at Danny. "Don't he look just like Cookie, too?"
The Cookie word was enough to tell Danny where these old ladies were from, and why they might have been badgering Celeste about honey in pizza dough and a little fella of a cook--one who limped.
"Your name was Danny," Dot said to him. "Have you changed your name, too?"
"No," the writer told them too quickly.
"I gotta meet this here cook," May said.
"Why don'tcha tell your dad to come say hello to us, will ya?" Dot asked Danny. "It's been so long since we seen one another, we got some serious catchin' up to do."
Celeste came back with the ladies' desserts, which Danny knew would be only a temporary distraction.
"Celeste," Danny said. "Would you please tell Pop that there are two old friends who want to see him? Tell him they're from Twisted River," Danny told her.
"Our cook's name is Tony," Celeste said a little desperately to the bad old broads. She'd heard enough about Twisted River to make her hope she would never hear anything more about it. (The cook had told her it would be all over on the day Twisted River caught up to him.)
"Your cook's name is Cookie," Dot said to the waitress.
"Just tell him we're chokin'," May told Celeste. "That'll bring him runnin'."
"Limpin', you mean," Dot corrected her, but now their cackles were suppressed. If the writer had to guess, it seemed that these women had a score to settle with his father.
"You got the same superior-soundin' voice as your daddy," May said to Danny.
"Is the Injun around?" Dot asked him.
"No, Jane is ... long gone," Danny told them.
In the kitchen, Celeste was still dry-eyed when she walked past her daughter. "I could have used a little help with the party of eight, Mom," Loretta was saying to her, "and then those three couples came in, but you just kept talking away to those two old biddies."
"Those old biddies are from Twisted River," Celeste told the cook. "They said to tell you they were chokin' ... Cookie." Celeste had never seen such an expression on Tony Angel's face--none of them had--but of course she'd never called him "Cookie" before.
"Is there a problem, boss?" the sous chef asked.
"It was the honey in the pizza, wasn't it?" Celeste was saying. "The honey gave it away, I guess."
"Dot and May. It's finished, sweetheart," Tony Angel said to Celeste; she started to cry.
"Mom?" Loretta said.
"You don't know me," the cook told them all. "You won't ever know where I go from here." He took off his apron and let it fall on the floor. "You're in charge, Greg," he said to the sous chef.
"They don't know your last name, not unless Danny tells them," Celeste managed to say; Loretta was holding her while she sobbed.
The cook walked out into the dining room. Danny was standing between him and the two tough broads. "They don't know the Angel name, Pop," his son whispered to him.
"Well, that's something to be thankful for," his dad said.
"I wouldn't call that a little limp--would you, May?" Dot asked her old friend.
"Hello, ladies," the cook said to them, but he didn't come any closer.
"The limp's gotten worse, if you ask me," May replied to Dot.