"I don't know. A few bills. She gave him some, and he shook his head, and she gave him more."
Stevo thought about it. He was a broad, slow, gray-headed man with a mustache like a push broom and forearms covered with old grease burns, and he had been kind to Lauren for nine years without ever once saying anything kind to her, which was the way of the men she had grown up with.
"Corky Sweeney's all right," he said finally. "He's not a crook. Not that I ever heard."
"Then why is she giving him money? She can't buy her own eggs."
"I don't know," Stevo said. "I don't know why anybody does anything." He turned back to the grill. "You want me to talk to Corky?"
"No," Lauren said. "I don't know. Not yet."
It sat in her all day, like a stone in a shoe. A woman of nearly eighty with no coat, with thirty cents for coffee, taking toast home in her napkin, paying a coal man in an alley. There were people who preyed on the old. Everybody knew that. There were nephews who came around on the third of the month, when the checks came. Lauren thought about the thin fold of bills going into the front of the mackinaw, and the man licking his thumb.
She thought she would ask Johanna about it in the morning. She thought she would find a way to ask that wasn't an insult. She lay awake that night in the dark, beside Gordie, working on the words.
At five-thirty, when the alarm went off, the radio said it was thirty-one below zero at the Bert Mooney airport, and falling.