Cassia saw him coming down the main aisle and understood immediately why the girl from the deli had cried. It was not that he was frightening, exactly. He was big, and the beard and the vest and the boots and the fact that he walked like a man who expected the floor to hold him, and it did, all of it took up space. But what struck her was the way he carried the dolls. He carried them flat against his chest with both forearms, the way you carry something you have been told is fragile, or the way you carry a sleeping child from a car into a house when you do not want to wake her.
There were two people in Bonita's line and nobody in hers.
He came to hers.
"Hi," Cassia said. "Did you find everything okay?"
It was the sentence she said three hundred times a day. She heard how stupid it sounded as it came out, and she watched him hear it too.
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
His voice was lower than she expected, and quieter. He set the three boxes down on the belt one at a time, the yellow, then the blue, then the red-haired one, and lined them up so their edges were square, and then took his hand away. She noticed his fingers. They were thick and scarred across the knuckles, and there was black grease worked into the creases that no amount of washing would ever get out, and the nails were cut very short and clean.
She scanned the yellow one. The register said STARLIGHT KINGDOM DOLL YLW, $24.97. She scanned the blue. She scanned the red-haired one and the price came up and she said, without deciding to, "Somebody's lucky."
She felt Bonita go still at the next register.
The man looked at her. Not at her face, at first, but at her name tag, which said CASSIA and under it, in smaller letters, Ask me about our Highline Rewards card! Then he looked at her face.
"It's her birthday," he said.
"Oh," Cassia said. "Happy birthday to her. It's mine, too, actually." She did not know why she said it. Shay's cupcake was sitting right there on its napkin with the plastic ring in it, a stupid pink announcement, and some part of her must have felt obliged to explain it. "Today. I'm twenty-two. So. Tell her happy birthday from a fellow October seventeenth."
He did not say anything.
She thought for a second she had done the thing the deli girl had done, that she had stepped somewhere she should not have stepped, and she felt the heat climb up her neck. She hit the subtotal key. "That's seventy-nine forty-four with tax," she said, a little too briskly.
He was looking at the cupcake.