"City shut it in November," Gordie said. "Boiler failed inspection. State inspector came through, said there's a cracked section, said it's not safe to fire, no certificate. Carrigan had to move everybody out. Bunch of the old guys went to the county home, some went to family. Carrigan's had a guy keeping a little fire in it since, just enough to keep the pipes from freezing, because he had a buyer from Missoula wanted to make it into offices. Buyer pulled out last week. So Carrigan can't keep paying for coal for a building with nobody in it. He wants it drained before the big cold comes." He shook ketchup onto his pasty. "Thursday the twenty-second, eight in the morning. Four floors, forty-two rooms, every one of them's got a sink. Steam radiators on every floor. Me and Stu and Stu's nephew, it'll take all day."
"What big cold?" said Mandy.
"Radio says there's a big cold coming down from Canada," Gordie said. "Real big. Like a polar bear sitting on us."
"Is there going to be school?"
"There's always school," said Lauren. "Eat your pasty."
She did not think about the Carrigan Rooms again that night. She did not have any reason to.
Johanna Treloar kept coming to the Gallus Frame. She came every morning at twenty past seven, and Lauren fed her. It became a thing between them, a small dry joke without much laughing in it. The cook had made a mistake again. Stevo, at the grill, played his part by sighing loudly and saying, to no one, "Sure, blame the cook," and on Saturday he came out of the kitchen with a bowl of his mother's sarma, the cabbage rolls he made for the Serbian Christmas in January and practiced on all December, and put it in front of Johanna with a slice of bread and said, "Taste that and tell me if it needs salt, I can't tell anymore," and walked away before she could answer.
She ate it all. She always ate it all. And she always, at the end, folded something into her napkin and put it in the cardigan pocket. The parsley, a piece of toast, the crust of the bread. Once, when she thought Lauren was down at the other end of the counter, she took two of the little foil packets of grape jelly out of the rack and slipped them into her pocket too, quick as a bird, and then sat very still with her face red.
Lauren didn't say anything. But the next morning, when she set down the plate, there were two pieces of toast on it instead of one, and a side of bacon nobody had ordered, and a fat pat of butter, and Johanna looked at it a long time before she picked up her fork.
On Monday, the nineteenth, Lauren went out the back door at ten-thirty with the trash and saw her.