"Bonita told me," Shay said. "Happy birthday. Don't eat it in front of customers."
"I'm not twelve."
"You're not not twelve," Shay said, and moved on.
At eleven-forty, Cassia heard the motorcycle.
She did not know at first that it was a motorcycle, only that something low and heavy had pulled into the lot on the east side, where the doors faced the garden center, and that the sound came through the glass and the noise of the store the way thunder comes through a house, more in the floor than in the ear. Then it stopped, and the store got a little quieter, the way it does when people have turned to look at something and then turned back and pretended they hadn't.
Bonita, at register eight, leaned over the bagging carousel between them.
"Mija," she said. "That's him."
Elam Caskey parked in the same place he parked every year, in the last spot of the third row, under the light pole with the dented base, because nobody else wanted that spot and he did not like his bike near other people's car doors. He sat on it for a minute after he shut it off. He always did. His knees were sixty-seven years old and they liked to be consulted.
The bike was a 1994 Road King, black once, now the color of a black thing that had been left out in the weather for a long time on purpose, and it was the only thing he had owned continuously since his daughter was a teenager. He had rebuilt the engine twice and replaced most of everything else, so that there was a fair argument it was not the same motorcycle at all. He did not care for that argument. A man was allowed to decide a few things.
He swung his leg over, took off his gloves, and put them in the left saddlebag, next to the coffee can.
He did not take the coffee can out. He never did, in the lot. But he put his hand on the lid for a second, the way another man might touch the brim of his hat passing a church, and then he buckled the bag and walked toward the doors.
The doors opened for him the way they opened for everybody. That had always struck him as a kind of grace. The automatic doors did not care what he looked like.
He knew what he looked like. He had a beard that went down past his collarbone, gray going white at the chin and still dark at the corners of the mouth, and his hair was tied back in a short tail with a rubber band he had taken off a newspaper. He wore a leather vest over a gray thermal, and jeans, and boots that had been resoled at the same shoe shop on Union Avenue so many times that the old man who did it called them "the patients." On his right forearm, where the sleeve was