He put his right hand flat on the counter, as if the floor had tipped.
She looked down at it. At the forearm. The bluebird was there, blurred and softened, and the banner, and RAELYNN, and she saw now that the Y and the two N's had a little flourish under them, a curl at the end of the last N that she had traced with her fingertip a hundred times through crackling plastic, and here it was, on skin, an arm's length away from her, on a living arm with gray hair growing through the ink.
"Oh, God," the man said, very quietly. Not to her. "Oh, God, I did that. I cut those. I sat at the kitchen table and I cut those."
"Ma'am?" said the woman with the paper towels, who had finished with the tabloids and was now in line, and had noticed something at last. "Are you open?"
Then Bonita was there. Cassia did not see her come around the carousel, but suddenly there was Bonita's hand on her back, warm and solid between her shoulder blades, and Bonita's voice, very calm, the voice Cassia had heard her use with a man who had once collapsed in the vitamin aisle. "Ma'am, I can take you right over here on eight, come on over, sweetheart. Shay. Shay." And Shay, from somewhere, saying what, and Bonita saying, "Cassia needs her break now, please," in a tone that did not ask.
"I still have to ring him up," Cassia said.
"I'll ring him up."
"No." It came out too loud. A couple of heads turned in the next lines. She lowered her voice. "No. I'll do it."
She took the four twenties out of his hand. She did not remember afterward how. She counted out his change, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, fifty-six cents, and she bagged the three dolls in a single big bag and then, because the handles looked thin, she double-bagged them, and she tore the receipt off the printer and held it out to him, and only when he took it, and their fingers did not touch, did she realize she had been holding her breath the whole time.
"There's a bench," she said. "By the garden center doors. Outside. I get fifteen minutes."
"You don't have to..."
"I know I don't have to." She heard the edge in her own voice and did not take it back. "Fifteen minutes."
The bench by the garden center was metal and painted green and someone had carved RJ + T into the armrest a long time ago and then someone else had tried to paint over it. It faced the lot. From it you could see the light pole with the dented base, and under it, a black motorcycle so old and weathered it looked like it had been dug up.