The breakfast rush was hitting its peak when we learned about the dead woman lying not far from Table Four.
Tucked into the corner of our dining patio, Table Four was up against a rustic fence of seven-foot-tall wooden posts sharpened into points, like in an Old West fort. On the other side of the fence were train tracks. If you were sitting at Four and peered through the narrow slits between the fence posts, you would see the dead body under the train.
Across the tracks, magenta bougainvillea blazed against the mission-style Amtrak station, which matched the mission-style mission a block away. The ghosts of indigenous slaves who’d died building the mission were said to haunt the historic street on which our cafe stood. The restaurant was also the house of its chef and owner, Z., and from the dining patio you could see right into the tiny kitchen. That’s his actual kitchen, our regulars would gloat to the friends they’d brought. This was 2003, pre-smartphones, pre-Yelp, when it was still possible to feel like you’d stumbled upon a magical eatery that no one else knew about. Our place seemed designed to inspire possessiveness among our guests, who clutched its secluded strangeness like a found jewel, looking offended whenever we told them how long the wait was.
