The waitress wanted to know if someone would be joining me.

It was a Saturday afternoon, pre-COVID, and people crowded the tables at Zip’s Cafe, a small restaurant whose interior was as dark as it probably had been the first time its doors opened in the 1920s. I was ordering a burger in Cincinnati the first time I began to sense that the Midwest was somehow familiar to me, which is to say that the Midwest was somehow Latin American.