"Ostrowe tells me I've been wrong about you," Sergeant Kolb said.
"Could be," said Lazaro.
The sergeant nodded slowly, as if that was the answer he'd expected and also the one he'd come for. He looked at the can again, and at the hand-lettered sign. TAKE ONE. NO QUESTIONS.
"My nephew," he said, after a while, to the can rather than to Lazaro. "Two years ago. In Corning. Nobody had one of those."
Lazaro didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that would be big enough, so he didn't try.
Sergeant Kolb reached out and took a white box from the can and put it in the pocket of his Bills jacket. Then he walked back up the alley to Lake Street without saying goodbye, which Lazaro thought was probably the most honest goodbye he'd gotten in years.
The second Saturday in November was cold and bright, with that hard clear light the Southern Tier gets right before it gives up on the year. Lazaro was in the alley at ten in the morning with the Shovelhead, and the carburetor was back on, and the new jets were in, and for the first time in a very long while he had the feeling, as he sat looking at it, that he had done everything he knew how to do and what happened now was up to the machine.
He heard them before he saw them. Two sets of footsteps, a woman's and a child's, coming down from the Lake Street end, not running.
Celestina had a brown paper bag in one hand. Emi had a red Folgers can, the big one, under his arm, and a coil of wire, and a piece of cardboard. Celestina's jaw had gone down. She was wearing jeans and a thick sweater and no scrubs; the state review would not be heard until January, Arliss Duchene's sixty-day review not until the week before Christmas, and in the meantime she was working mornings at a dry cleaner on Water Street that paid twelve dollars less an hour, and she did not look happy, exactly, but she looked like someone who had put a heavy thing down and was still getting used to how her arms felt without it.
She stopped where she had stopped six and a half years before, by the dumpster. Lazaro saw her see it. He saw her decide to stand there anyway.