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a detail by Vermeer. And as he stood over the hot kitchen range in his jeans and his white short-sleeved shirt, slightly-built, dark-haired, a little used-looking but still attractive, Daniel appeared to Cara to become irradiated with some of the same domestic magic. Portrait of the chef as a tired but friendly angel.
    ‘You were strange last night,’ she told him. ‘Strange and wonderful. Too gentle for a short-order cook.’
    ‘Restaurant proprietor, he corrected her. He scraped frozen onion slices into the skillet and they began to sizzle.
    ‘Restaurant proprietor, whatever, she smiled.
    ‘You think I’m strange?’ he asked.
    She nodded happily. He frowned at her for a moment and then shrugged. As a matter of fact, he had often thought himself that he must have been born into some kind of backward-facing looking-glass land. His life and his career always seemed to turn out the polar opposite of what he really wanted, and of what he was really capable of achieving. The only points he ever managed to score in the 36 years he had been alive were into his own goal. Even his face, when he saw it in photographs, looked as if it were the wrong way around; as if the man he glimpsed in mirrors and store windows was the way he actually should have been, and the face with which he
    walked around all day was his awkward other-self, his klutzy doppelganger.
    He should have been a famous TV entertainer, a kind of alternative Johnny Carson, a poor man’s Dan Rather. Instead, he ran Daniel’s Downhome Diner, in Apache Junction, Arizona, beside the heat-wavering horizon of the Superstition Mountains, near the famous Lost Dutchman Mine. Daniel’s Downhome Diner was popular enough, if popularity meant anything at all in a town of 2,391 and falling. There was an intermittent passing-through trade, truckers and tourists and windpump salesmen, as well as hitch-hikers and assorted mysteriosos. Sometimes the customers were friendly; sometimes offensive. Sometimes they cried into their coffee, or threw chairs through the window. There were nine gingham-covered tables, red gingham, with plastic tomatoes full of ketchup, and a 1967 jukebox with Happy Together by the Turtles and Penny Lane by the Beatles, not because Daniel held any special memories of 1967, but simply because the lock was broken and nobody could get into the juke-i box to change the records. On the wall there was a smeary blackboard menu, Franks & Beans, Minute Steaks & Beans, Tamales, Empanadas, Cheeseburgers. All good downhome stuff, although Daniel was actually capable of ! tossing together oysters Bienville, or pompano en papillate, or ( even pigeonneaux royaux au sauce paradis, with equal equanimity. His father had been a chef at Alciatore’s in San ‘< Francisco in the 1950s, and had taught him to cook with j all the care and patience and calculated disgust of a real professional. Daniel rarely prepared such exotica these days, mainly because he was more than seriously tired of cooking by the end of the day, and because nobody else in Apache Junction would have wanted to eat anything like that anyway. Apache Junctioneers ate a lot of steak and a lot of beans and that was just about it. He could just imagine the reaction he would get from Indian Bill Hargraves if he served him up tender fragments of crab and mushrooms and fish in a paper poke. ‘What the hell’s this, a Western Airlines sickbag?’
    He had never meant to run a restaurant, especially not here in Final County, Arizona. He had tried singing, and selling, and sucking out sewers, and collecting tolls on the Indian National Turnpike in Oklahoma. He had even worked as a stand-up comedian in a quasi-Victorian topless nightspot in Nevada called the Gaslight. ‘And Moses is standing on top of the mountain, right, and he says to Jehovah, listen, let me get this straight, you want us to cut the end of our dicks off?’ That was where he had met and married Candii, Susie’s mother, blonde curls and snub nose