With its wood floor and tables it would take about five minutes to burn the place to its foundation, assuming the builders included one.

Almost deserted at half past eight on a Saturday morning, it is so lonely looking I have to wonder if I heard Angela correctly. A teenager in a ponytail behind a long green counter at the back of the room holds up a coffee cup as I take the seat nearest the window. I nod, uncertain whether she is taking my order or saluting her first customer in a month. Without a word, the girl, who is dressed in a clean, starched yellow waitress uniform, brings an oversized mug of coffee complete with a jar of real cream, an unexpected pleasure in an age where you usually get charged a buck for a thimble-sized cup accompanied by a plastic container of ground chalk. Solemnly, she places her pad and pencil on the table by the mug, and I wonder if she is seizing this moment to announce a work stoppage when it dawns on me that she is deaf. Uncertain whether she can read lips, I write that I am waiting for someone. She nods and leaves me to stare out the window across the street at the

vacant lot where a small concrete block factory once stood. At the rate this town is going, twenty years from now, there may not even be a Bear Creek. Why doesn’t capitalism work here? Is it racist to think that blacks don’t take to free enterprise?

Is it the need to dominate and control they lack? Even as black as Bear Creek is becoming, it appeared to me yesterday during my brief drive down Main Street that most all the stores are still owned either by whites, Chinese, or Jews. Yet that might not hold true much longer.

Will Angela leave? She would if she’s smart. There is no future for her here. I sip at my coffee, certain that her choice of meeting places reflects her ambivalence about seeing me again.

How could any involvement with me do anything but hurt her? What did she say-Paul is the air we breathe?